Random Thoughts

Random Thoughts (35)

Liu Jiming · April 5, 2026 · Source: Cao Zhenglu–Liu Jiming Research Center

Handling political problems by non-political means (and “non-political” here covers administrative, economic, and criminal measures alike) is simply another way of hanging out a sheep’s head while selling dog meat.[2]

1
Before the 1980s, modernist literature (the work of writers like Kafka and Eliot) emerged as a critique of capitalism and as its antithesis. Today it has become one of capitalism’s gilded shop signs.

2
Whether in the days when I held a place within the system, or now as a “man of the Left,”[3] I have always been in the minority.

3
To me, the attacks and slanders of the Right are a certificate of honor in reverse. Nothing pleases me more than watching them lose their minds while they denounce me as an “ultra-leftist.”

4
Most people, out of self-interest, like to attach themselves to the strong or to those in power. I would rather stand, always, on the side of the weak.

5
History has moved from an age written by elites into an age written by the people. When everyone can write, gagging and silencing lose much of their effect, and may even backfire. I recommend a poem, “When the People Begin to Write,” in commemoration of the 132nd anniversary of the birth of the great leader of the people, Chairman Mao Zedong. [Click here to read “When the People Begin to Write”]

6
Marxism holds that the state is a machine by which one class oppresses another. It is the product of irreconcilable class antagonisms and the embodiment of the ruling class’s will, which that class elevates into universal norms through law and policy. On nationalism, Marx and Engels state clearly in The German Ideology that the nation is an “illusory community,” and that struggles between nations are illusory struggles whose purpose is to conceal the real class struggle.[4] Nationalism is not a self-evident natural truth but a product of the capitalist era. Yet in China today, many “leftists” and self-proclaimed Marxists speak of nothing but the national interest and the great cause of the nation. In their eyes one rarely sees, and often sees no trace at all of, the working people and the proletariat. If such people are leftists, even revered as standard-bearers, then I confess: I am not that kind of “leftist,” nor that kind of “Marxist.”

7
Capitalism comes in democratic and authoritarian forms, and both produce a “kill line.”[5] This is determined by the system of exploitation itself, and the world’s proletarians, together with part of the petty bourgeoisie, are the people most exposed to it. Many patriotic “little pinks”[6] cannot see this, or pretend not to. They keep their eyes fixed on the number-one capitalist country while ignoring the beasts of burden running themselves ragged below the “kill line” all around them. History has already shown that only socialism can abolish the “kill line.” There is no other choice.

8
The United States’ brazen invasion of socialist Venezuela and its piratical kidnapping of President Maduro show that this foremost imperialist power has revealed the fascist face beneath its neoliberal mask, and has turned completely into a gang. With his own frenzied actions, Trump has torn down the long-standing myth of America as the beacon of liberal democracy and the civilized world, dispelled many people’s illusions about the so-called new international order that capitalism built after the Cold War, and confirmed that the greatest terrorist organization and terrorist individual of our time are none other than the United States and Trump himself. It also shows that US imperialism is not only the greatest threat to peace for humankind, but the most vicious enemy of the international communist movement and of oppressed nations and peoples. Workers of the world, unite! Defeat US imperialism and all its running dogs!

9
Trump’s sending of troops to invade Venezuela, seize President Maduro, and put him on illegal trial is US imperialism’s attempt to strangle at the root[7] Venezuela’s “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century,” founded by Chávez, carried forward by Maduro, and driven into difficulty by a range of subjective and objective causes. In the short term, this may temporarily check the socialist movements rising one after another across Latin America. But historical dialectics teaches us that greater oppression only brings greater resistance. In the long run, it may push Latin America’s left, Venezuela included, from social reform toward thoroughgoing revolution, and make the region the center of the global struggle against imperialism and hegemony, and of the revival of twenty-first-century socialism.

10
Iran needs to be liberated from its long rule by extremist religious theocracy. That does not mean returning to the dark Pahlavi dynasty that was overthrown, nor throwing itself into the arms of a US imperialism that marches under the banner of democracy and freedom. It means a true people’s revolution. More precisely, this revolution must be led by the proletariat and its party, and must make a complete break with the bourgeois state machine and with private ownership. Otherwise, even if the Khamenei regime falls, the fruits of the revolution will be seized by the restorationist forces of the last crown prince, or by the United States and its proxies, and the Iranian people will be plunged back into the abyss of exploitation, oppression, and servitude, as we have seen in Bangladesh and Syria.

11
The Chinese left (mainly the national left)[8] has long held a mistaken view: that whatever America does or advocates must be opposed. In fact, it is not that simple. US armed aggression and economic sanctions against weaker nations, especially those with socialist leanings such as Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, must of course be opposed. But when it comes to military intervention against despotic or even feudal-theocratic states such as Iran, where a privileged minority maintains its exploitation and oppression of the majority by violent repression, there is no need to oppose it in the name of so-called international law or the principle that “sovereignty outranks human rights.” To do so is, objectively, to act as an accomplice of those reactionary regimes. The correct position is to stand with the oppressed and exploited peoples of the whole world, and to support every struggle that the people of such a country, above all its proletariat, wage to overthrow the brutal bourgeois state machine and the feudal-capitalist order and to win freedom and liberation.

12
In Left Review I came across a preface that Sartre wrote in 1972 for The Maoists in France. Several passages left a strong impression, and I copy them here as a reminder to myself:[9]

“The age of signing petitions, or of holding forth before crowds at authorized rallies (and since so many rallies have been banned, one cannot help asking why it is precisely ours that has been permitted), is over. A revolutionary is bound to move toward illegal action.”

“As soon as the masses move toward praxis, even locally, they are already the people, at the very beginning of realizing themselves.”

“When the bourgeoisie claims to act according to a ‘humanist’ morality (work, family, fatherland), it is only covering up its deep-rooted immorality and trying to alienate the workers. It will never be moral. The workers and peasants, by contrast, are always moral when they rise in revolt, because they never exploit anyone.”

“The Maoists, with their anti-authoritarian practice, appear as the only revolutionary force (still only at its beginnings), the only one capable of adopting new forms of class struggle in the stage of organic capitalism.”

Sartre holds that the masses can be called the people only when they throw themselves into praxis and become the subjects of history. “When they rise in revolt, they are always moral,” whereas the bourgeoisie, so long as it exploits others, “will never be moral.” These views bear the stamp of the anti-capitalist, anti-establishment tide that swept the world in the 1960s, and reading them today, when the whole world kneels at capitalism’s feet, is especially stirring. Moreover, his definition of revolution and rebellion (anti-authoritarianism) as the essence of “Maoism” (“a revolutionary is bound to move toward illegal action”) is a warning to wake the world. Set beside certain “leftists” of today who style themselves Marxist-Leninist-Maoists yet are forever waiting for the system to grant them favor and take them in, the difference is as great as that between the clouds and the mud.[10]

13
People generally assume that the law should punish evil, reward good, and uphold justice. Yet in most Chinese-made crime thrillers, the perpetrators are themselves victims and avengers, and every plot, without exception, revolves around investigating, hunting down, and trying them. When the righteous policemen and judges on screen bring these insulted and injured avengers to justice one by one, they become no different from Javert in Hugo’s Les Misérables, set against the audience’s sympathy and against justice and goodness. This is not only an emotional misalignment but an inversion of values. Its aesthetic effect is that audiences stop trusting in the fairness of the law, and social morality and ethics begin to come apart. From this we can see that law is an instrument of class rule and has never stood for justice or fairness. So it was in the past, so it is now, and so it will remain.

14
A person can suffer from schizophrenia. So can a country, or a party, and the consequences are far graver.

15
Handling political problems by non-political means (and “non-political” here covers administrative, economic, and criminal measures alike) is simply another way of hanging out a sheep’s head while selling dog meat.

16
If even Sima Nan cannot be tolerated, you can see how rotten things have become.[11]

17
A fine writer does not dwell in the real world, but in the world he creates with language. For him, the second is more real than the first.

18
From Han supremacism to the Hanfu movement,[12] nationalism’s epileptic fits grow more hysterical each time, giving off a stench of decay as if from an ancient tomb. Behind them stand not only the backing of authoritarian politics but also the logic of consumerist capital. This confirms once again the judgment of Marx, Engels, and Lenin: nationalist discourse is in essence the rhetoric of capitalism and feudalism, and when it flares up in malignant form, the result is bound to be fascism.

19
Nothing but death can break me.

Translator’s notes

[1] Random Thoughts (随想录): the series title echoes Ba Jin’s celebrated five-volume collection of the same name (1978–1986), in which he reflected on the Cultural Revolution. Liu borrows the form while writing from the opposite political direction.

[2] “Hanging out a sheep’s head while selling dog meat” (挂羊头卖狗肉): a proverb for advertising one thing and selling another; roughly “false advertising” or “sailing under false colors.”

[3] “Man of the Left” (左人): a half-ironic self-label, distinct from the more formal 左派 (“leftist”).

[4] “Illusory community”: in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels apply this term chiefly to the state. Liu extends it to the nation.

[5] “Kill line” (宰杀线): a Chinese internet term, borrowed from gaming, for the threshold below which a person in a market society, after one illness, layoff, or debt, falls into irreversible ruin.

[6] “Little pinks” (小粉红): online slang for young, fervently nationalist netizens. Liu writes 爱锅 (“wok-loving”) as a mocking homophone for 爱国 (“patriotic”). “Beasts of burden” (牛马): literally “oxen and horses,” current slang for overworked, underpaid workers.

[7] “Strangle at the root” (釜底抽薪): literally “pulling the firewood from under the cauldron,” a proverb for cutting off something’s source of strength.

[8] “National left” (民左): short for 民族主义左翼, the nationalist left, which Liu distinguishes from the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist left he identifies with.

[9] Sartre’s preface: written for Michèle Manceaux’s Les Maoïstes en France (1972). The passages here are translated from Liu’s Chinese, not from Sartre’s French original, and may differ in wording from published English versions.

[10] “As different as the clouds and the mud” (判若云泥): a set phrase for an unbridgeable difference in worth.

[11] Sima Nan (司马南): a prominent nationalist commentator who was publicly penalized for tax evasion in 2025. Liu discusses the case at length in Random Thoughts (26) and (27).

[12] Han supremacism (皇汉主义) and the Hanfu movement (汉服运动): the first is an online ideology exalting the Han ethnic group and its imperial past; the second is a fashion and cultural revival of traditional Han-style dress.

Random Thoughts (34)

Liu Jiming · March 27, 2026 · Source: Cao Zhenglu–Liu Jiming Research Center

Whenever the iron fist of the bureaucrat-capitalist dictatorship comes down on me, I feel a kind of tension, and of exhilaration.

1
Just as I predicted in a Weibo post, they came after all. The only thing I can do is put it all on record. (July 8, 2025)

2
Each time I hear that someone I knew has died, I feel Death’s footsteps draw a little closer to me. But I feel no fear. I have done what I ought to do and what was worth doing, and even if I were to leave this world tomorrow, I would have nothing to regret.

3
Many on the left (mainly the petty bourgeoisie and the nationalist left) turn a blind eye to the severe class exploitation and oppression of contemporary society, while sinking into and agonizing over the ethnic conflicts of the past. They blame the sufferings of the broad laboring masses, the Han included, on invasions by so-called “barbarian peoples” rather than on the feudal ruling class, and even glorify feudal emperors. In doing so they completely forget Marx’s thesis that the history of human society is the history of class struggle, and forget Chairman Mao’s argument in the “Cave Dialogue”[13] that the rise and fall of dynasties results from irreconcilable class contradictions. Some even blame China’s backwardness on the Manchu conquest for cutting short the late-Ming “sprouts of capitalism,”[14] which is to go over entirely to the bourgeois standpoint. Others are angered by this absurd phenomenon and have even grown pessimistic about the future of the left. But neither anger nor pessimism helps. No social phenomenon arises by chance; each has deep roots in history and in present conditions, and so-called “Han supremacism” is no exception. At bottom, it is the inevitable result of the mainstream ideology’s shift from a class narrative to a national narrative, from the people’s view of history to an elite view of history. Most ordinary “Han supremacists” are simply victims captured by this view of history. With them, criticism and struggle alone are not enough, and still less should they be treated as enemies. They should be patiently persuaded, with explanations grounded in the basic tenets of Marxism. As for the broad proletariat, we must help them understand that all history is contemporary history.[15] If the proletariat cannot see its true identity and condition clearly, it will never escape the double enslavement, material and spiritual, imposed by the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, take its fate into its own hands, and win true liberation.

4
In a commentary video on the film Youth that went viral on Bilibili, I came to the line “In the end, Big Brother’s life’s work ended up as nothing but a stand-in,” and then the screen filled with “Long live the people!” My eyes filled with tears.

5
More and more, I feel that I am living in an invisible cage. (December 13)

6
As cultural allegories of the post-revolutionary era, Let the Bullets Fly and Hidden Man are the two greatest films of contemporary China (after 1976), bar none.[16] If Let the Bullets Fly is an allegory of the Chinese revolution, Hidden Man tells a revenge story of the post-revolutionary age. Zhu Qianlong murders his master yet inherits his master’s place, turns black into white, and makes his fellow disciple Li Tianran the scapegoat, branded as a traitor to his master and his lineage. When Li Tianran finally kills Zhu Qianlong, it means more than clearing his own name and avenging his master. It means turning an upside-down history right side up again.

7
The Chinese revolution triumphed by organizing workers and peasants who had been like a tray of loose sand.[17] What the bureaucrat-capitalists fear most is people existing in any organized form at all, not even online.

8
Whenever the iron fist of the bureaucrat-capitalist dictatorship comes down on me, I feel a kind of tension, and of exhilaration.

Translator’s notes

[1] The “Cave Dialogue” (窑洞对): a 1945 conversation in Yan’an in which the educator Huang Yanpei asked Mao how the Communists would escape the historical cycle of dynastic rise and fall. Mao’s answer was democracy: letting the people supervise the government.

[2] “Sprouts of capitalism” (资本主义萌芽): a long-running thesis in Chinese historiography that late-Ming China showed early signs of capitalist development.

[3] “All history is contemporary history”: the dictum of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce.

[4] Let the Bullets Fly (2010) and Hidden Man (2018): both directed by Jiang Wen, and widely read in China as political allegories.

[5] “A tray of loose sand” (一盘散沙): Sun Yat-sen’s famous image for the disunity of the Chinese people.

Random Thoughts (31)

Liu Jiming · July 2, 2025 · Source: Human Realm website

1
Throughout history, in China and abroad, many revolutions have marched under the banner of bringing welfare and liberation to the poor. Yet once they succeed and take power, most of them betray their original aims. The party of the poor becomes a “party of the rich,” and the dragon-slayer becomes the dragon. This is the historical cycle.[1] Unless this pattern is fundamentally changed, the legitimacy and justice of revolution will be gravely damaged. In his later years Mao Zedong tried to break the cycle, but after his death his effort was quickly reversed.

2
Many bourgeois politicians, Trump and Putin among them, claim to represent the people, just as feudal emperors always styled themselves Sons of Heaven. In their eyes, exploiters and exploited alike are “the people.” But the exploited count as people only on one condition: they must accept the unequal social order the bourgeoisie imposes on them, and become docile subjects and “leeks” to be harvested.[2] The moment they challenge or resist the existing political order, they are kicked out of the ranks of the people, even of citizens, branded troublemakers, rioters, and rebels, and cruelly suppressed.

3
Unlike hypocritical bourgeois politicians, proletarian revolutionaries and leaders never claim to represent “the whole people.” They fight, always, for the interests of the proletariat and the broad masses of working people. As The Communist Manifesto says, communists never hide the fact that the aim of their struggle is to abolish private property, and finally to build an “association of free individuals” without class exploitation or oppression. Only then will proletarian revolutionary leaders say that they are working for the freedom and liberation of all humanity. Until then, anyone who dresses up his own special interests as the interests of the whole people is either a bourgeois politician, or a traitor to the proletariat, or a revisionist of one kind or another.

4
In the literature and art of the first thirty years,[3] works depicting the New Democratic Revolution and the socialist revolution mostly had workers and peasants as their heroes. After Reform and Opening, the heroes were replaced by the rich: young masters and young ladies, that is, the landlords and bourgeoisie who had once been overthrown. The workers and peasants who had once been the makers of history became, once again, the servants, the nameless extras, even the clowns of the old opera stage. The revolution of the poor turned into a revolution of the rich. That is how history was quietly rewritten. Reality is no different. Hence, as the dictum of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce said, all history is contemporary history.[4]

5
Nothing in the world is more absurd than taking restoration and regression for progress and renewal, regarding great social transformation and progress as backward and rigid, and slandering the broadest and most profound era of people’s democracy in history as an era of autocracy and dictatorship. And such things have been staged again and again in human history: in Qin-dynasty China, Zhao Gao’s “Shaqiu Coup” and his “calling a deer a horse”;[5] in France, Louis Bonaparte’s coup of 18 Brumaire;[6] in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech.” As Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “The February Revolution was spirited away by a clever swindler. Instead of society winning a new content for itself, the state seemed only to have returned to its oldest form, to the shamelessly simple rule of the sword and the cowl.”

6
A netizen asked: what is “the worst kind of capitalism”? My answer: bureaucratic despotism combined with monopolistic marketization. Its chief feature is that the state machine is used to escort capital, while the people are stripped of their basic democratic rights. The propertyless are thus thrown into a jungle society with no welfare protection of any kind, and become refugees twice over, political and economic.

7
After more than forty years of degeneration, society has collapsed completely, beyond the power of any individual to change. I lack Mr. Lu Xun’s courage and sense of duty, his resolve that “if hereafter there is no torch, then I shall be the only light.”[7] Still, I do not shrink from setting down these scattered words with my feeble pen, so that those searching for light in the darkness may glimpse a ray of hope.

8
A netizen forwarded me these words from a reader: “The Human Realm captures people’s confusion and wandering; Black and White captures their pain and struggle. That alone is enough to make Teacher Liu a great writer who records history and life through fiction. But it is still not enough. He has not yet recorded people’s despair and their struggle of being-toward-death.[8] He has to keep writing. Teacher Liu has been silenced, and Black and White has been banned from publication: isn’t that exactly what will force him to keep writing? History will not forget its chroniclers, and we are fortunate to be the readers of that record. I wish Teacher Liu good health. In this suffocating world, may he go on recording history and life for countless people in despair.” In fact, Black and White does deal with “people’s despair and their struggle of being-toward-death.” After finishing that book, I truly did not want to write anything more. But the banning of the mainland edition, and the shutting down of my Sina Weibo account, rekindled my urge to write. If Black and White is my testimony to time, then Random Thoughts is my last will and testament to this world.

9
“Now the atmosphere seems to have changed. Nowhere do we hear songs about the moon and flowers; in their place come hymns to iron and blood. But if one speaks with a deceitful heart and a deceitful mouth, then whether one says A and O or Y and Z, it is all equally false. It can only shut the mouths of the so-called critics who once scorned the moon and flowers, and leave them content to believe that China is about to rise again. Poor fellows, beneath the great hat of ‘patriotism’ they have closed their eyes once more, or perhaps they never opened them.” These words come from Mr. Lu Xun’s “On Looking with Open Eyes.”[9] Though written a hundred years ago, they plainly describe the present. And when I think of all those eminent gentlemen in the literary world and the academy who built their careers on Lu Xun studies, or who wave the banner of Lu Xun to win titles as professors, doctoral supervisors, association presidents, and chairmen, yet whose words and deeds run directly counter to Lu Xun’s spirit, so that they deserve the names he hurled at the “false gentlemen” and at “running dogs past their prime” like Liang Shiqiu,[10] I cannot help blushing for them.

10
Revolutionaries have never been flawless. Like anyone else, they have shortcomings and make mistakes: being crude and heavy-handed in their methods, say, or not knowing how to unite with others. But such mistakes are not deliberate sabotage, and they can be corrected again and again in practice. The revolutionary ranks have never been pure. There are good people and bad, martyrs and turncoats, loyalty and betrayal. Very often the open spears and hidden arrows that strike a revolutionary come not from the enemy but from his own camp. Some people who always have Marxism on their lips, and who seem the most zealous of all, cannot bear the slightest grievance. Over a small loss of personal interest, or even a wound to their pride, they turn their guns on their own comrades, fellow fighters, teachers, and organization, and bite with a savagery greater than anything they show the real enemy, until in the end they wreck the whole revolutionary cause. The history of the twentieth-century international communist movement and of the Chinese revolution offers no shortage of examples, from Kautsky and Khrushchev to Gu Shunzhang and Zhang Guotao.[11] Throughout his life Lu Xun suffered far more attacks and slanders from his “own camp” than from the enemy’s, some of them from students he had once held in high regard (Xu Maoyong, for example). The dissolution of the League of Left-Wing Writers was mainly due to changes in the political situation and adjustments in the Communist Party’s cultural policy, but it was partly due to infighting within the League as well.[12] When Wei Wei was running Midstream, he was slandered as having “embezzled the journal’s funds.”[13] Such things have never disappeared from the history of the left-wing movement. Their bitter lessons are lamentable, and deserve deep reflection.

11
Over the years, between the students in my writing workshops and visitors who came “on the strength of my name,” I have met a good many young people. When they ask my advice, I always tell them frankly what I think. Not every word may be right, but it is the distillation of more than half a lifetime of seeking knowledge, so I hope I have not led anyone astray. Though my strength is slight and the social environment so hostile, whenever I find talent among the young, I do everything I can to recommend them and to give them more chances to prove themselves. This is no great merit, only the duty an elder owes. Perhaps because of this feeling, when I came under attack from a few young people, I was deeply disappointed, and even began to doubt whether my efforts had been worth it. But whatever happens, this world belongs to the young. As the young are, so the world of the future will be. Whether good or bad, they will create it, and they will bear it. Thinking of it this way, I am at peace.

12
A netizen left a comment on Zhihu: some people regard me as Yan’an. I laughed and replied: Yan’an fell long ago. I am only a lonely little island in the Kuomintang-controlled area.[14]

13
The French thinker Montaigne has a famous saying: “I live each day as if it were my last; when I leave home in the morning, I am ready never to come back.” He meant that death may arrive at any moment. In recent years I too have formed a habit. Every day I take stock of whether there is anything urgent left to do, and I never put off till tomorrow, or the day after, what can be done today, because after today there may be no more chances. For me, the threat of losing my freedom is far greater than the fear of death.

14
In daily life I am slow and clumsy. This stands in sharp contrast to the sensitivity, or sharpness, of my thoughts and feelings.

15
The history of the twentieth-century international communist movement, from glory to decline, from victory to defeat, shows that once a socialist country turns revisionist, the dictatorship of the proletariat inevitably becomes a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and its oppression and exploitation of the people will be far crueler than in capitalist countries.

16
[A question to think about] Today is the 104th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. I came across an article titled “Never Betray the Party, However Great the Wrong; Follow the Communist Party All My Life,” and a question suddenly occurred to me. A Party member certainly must not betray the Party because he has personally been wronged. But if a party betrays its own original aspiration and mission and takes the wrong road, should a Party member keep following it forever, or should he struggle against it, even break with it?

[4] “All history is contemporary history”: the dictum of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce.

[6] Louis Bonaparte’s coup: on December 2, 1851, Louis Bonaparte (later Napoleon III) seized dictatorial power. Marx’s title, The Eighteenth Brumaire, ironically likens it to his uncle Napoleon I’s coup of 18 Brumaire (1799). The Marx passage is rendered from Liu’s Chinese.

Random Thoughts (28)

Liu Jiming · May 4, 2025 · Source: Human Realm website

1
Western leftists mostly stand on the side of the working class, while nationalists are generally regarded as right-wing (the US Republican Party, for instance). In China, however, many leftists take a nationalist-statist position. So here is the question: who are the real leftists?

2
To expose every lie in present-day politics and to awaken the class consciousness of the exploited and oppressed: this is the most fundamental task of the Chinese left.

3
Unless “the people” is examined and analyzed within specific (class) social relations, it is an empty, meaningless concept.

4
Unlike many academic intellectuals who are absorbed in building theoretical models and soaring into abstraction, all my thinking is a response to real problems, honed through argument and exchange.

5
A right-wing friend of mine, whenever the Mao era comes up, denounces it as a “tyranny” and insists that peasants in those days were no better than untouchables. My answer: for landlords, capitalists, and rightists, that era may indeed have been the “tyranny” they accuse it of being. For workers and peasants, it was the most benevolent government of all. In the Mao era, countless peasants served as Party and government leaders at every level from the center down to the localities. Tell me: were those “untouchables”?

6
The alliance between the bureaucratic class and the bourgeoisie in China rests on shared interests, so it is not permanent . Once the former loses its grip on society, or no longer provides capital with institutional protection, the latter will show its true nature, which puts interest above all else, turn on its partner, and stab it in the back.

7
A netizen asked: what is crony capitalist society? My answer: a society in which power and capital collude, and in which a person’s status and worth are determined by both, is a crony capitalist society.

8
I have not said anything particularly profound. Much of it may be mere common sense. It is only because so many people are unwilling or afraid to say it that it has come to seem deep.

9
During the war between Germany and Russia, Lenin openly said he hoped Russia would be defeated, believing this would favor the Bolshevik revolution. Contemporary Russian right-wing nationalists and some Chinese liberal public intellectuals have therefore labeled Lenin a “traitor to Russia” and a “German spy.” Yet they forget their own history of relying on the West to subvert their countries’ socialist systems, which exposes their hypocrisy and double standards.

10
I came across an article commemorating Li Dazhao which said that he “died heroically for his country.” I was taken aback. As a principal founder of the Communist Party of China, Li Dazhao was, to both the Beiyang government and the Nationalist government, an enemy of the Republic of China, a ringleader of “rebels” who had to be eliminated under the Provisional Constitution.[16] Whose country did he die for?

11
Only when a writer writes not for personal fame and gain, but purely out of the need to express his thoughts and feelings, does he gain freedom in the true sense. And only if that writing is joined to the pursuit of truth and to the freedom and liberation of all humanity does it deserve to be called a noble cause.

12
As for the Soviet revisionist clique, rather than call them nationalists, it would be truer to call them fascists marching under the banner of communism and socialism.

13
If power answers only to those above and not to those below, officials will come to worship and even abuse the power in their hands, and grow extremely arrogant and willful, deaf to any criticism. Little do they know that when they try to snuff out every dissenting voice, not only will they fail, they will make those voices travel farther and faster, and stir up a revulsion and hatred that comes from the bottom of people’s hearts. If even the ancients could “exchange glances on the road,”[17] how much more can people today? Over time, this will surely turn into a volcano, and when that volcano erupts with a force that sweeps everything before it and makes people tremble, it will be too late for those headstrong officials to regret.

14
When Li Kui meets Li Gui,[18] you must not be afraid, still less back down. However powerful the impostor may look, however frightening his weapon, even if he wins for a while, he will feel a guilty unease. Because the real thing is, after all, the real thing, and a fake, however convincing, is still a fake.

Random Thoughts (27)

Liu Jiming · April 11, 2025 · Source: Human Realm website

1
The high-profile prosecution of Sima Nan for “tax evasion” marks a cooling of the nationalist tide that has run high in recent years. It also announces the bankruptcy of the national left’s attempt to “restore socialism” by amplifying, and manufacturing, an opposition between state-owned and private enterprises. At the same time, it shows that the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, to protect its own interests, has abandoned the nationalist left and moved closer to the nationalist right, in the hope of escaping an economic crisis that keeps getting worse. Of course, the national left’s loss of favor is temporary. Once the economy climbs out of the trough, it will be summoned again to meet the challenge of liberal capitalism, but its appeal will be much diminished. For more and more awakened proletarians, the banner of nationalism is simply too tattered ever to look as bright and alluring as it once did.

2
Because my Weibo account was shut down, some netizens advised me to be more strategic, show less of an edge, and practice more “hiding one’s light.”[20] My answer: losing the account is certainly a loss, but it only means shifting to another front and fighting on. I must never stop struggling because of it, just as the revolutionaries of earlier generations did not abandon, let alone betray, the revolution because some had fallen.

3
When I was at university, I read a best-selling book called “Underground Literature” during the Cultural Revolution. IIt introduced the activities and writing of quasi-underground liberal literary circles, represented by the Baiyangdian poets, including Shi Zhi’s “Believe in the Future,” Bei Dao’s “The Answer,” with its famous refrain “I don’t believe!”, and Li Ping’s novella When the Evening Glow Fades These works were later hailed as representative of Misty Poetry and the Literature of the Wounded. The Reform and Opening era also has its “underground literature,” except that, with the spread of the internet, it no longer circulates in hand-copied manuscripts as in the Cultural Revolution, but online. Neither was tolerated by the mainstream politics and literary establishment of its time, but their positions are completely opposite: the former right, the latter left. I am confident that if someone someday writes a book called “Underground Literature” in the Reform Era, it too will be a best-seller.

4
My eyesight is getting worse and worse. I can hardly read printed books any more. On my phone and computer I have to set the font to the largest size, and I must be all the more careful when I drive. Yet as my sight fades fast, my inner world has never been brighter or clearer. I am sure that if one day I go blind, this feeling of brightness and clarity will grow stronger still, just as I wrote thirty years ago in “Prophecy,” a short story published in the journal Shanhua: “Sha Ding’s gaze was suddenly veiled by darkness. Sha Ding knew that the blindness, suspended for so long, had descended once more. It would be a descent forever. But his heart was like broad day, and the sky of his thought was utterly clear.” Sha Ding is a novelist of prophecy.

5
To the netizens who praise me beyond my deserts, I must say again: I am far from being some “literary giant,” and still less can I hold up, by my own strength, an age that is sinking deeper every day. If there is anything distinctive about me, it is that my writing has always obeyed my own heart and convictions, and has never bowed to any outside force.

6
They can ban my works, close my accounts, and block my words, but they cannot stop me from thinking, unless they destroy me physically. And if they did that, not only would they fail, they would make my works and ideas spread even faster among the public, which is plainly the last thing they want.

7
The moment of showdown is near. I hear the footsteps drawing closer and closer...

8
Yesterday I went to see a close friend from university who was visiting Wuhan (the model for the character Shan Tao in my novella An Existential Objectivist in Zhengzhou). We had not seen each other for many years, and the moment we met we fell into a fierce argument, once again about how to judge the Mao era. On that question he and I stand at opposite poles, and in decades neither has been able to convince the other. Yet in our analysis and judgment of present-day politics, we agree to a remarkable degree, even though our proposed solutions differ fundamentally: he still stands on the right, and I still stand on the left. We nonetheless reached a common understanding, “set aside our differences and face reality,” and were glad of it. When we parted, we told each other to take care, reluctant to say goodbye, as if there had never been any quarrel at all.

9
I am told that my name has become a sensitive word on certain platforms. Should I be shocked, or honored? In other words, am I really so important that they fear me this much?

10
A few years ago, when the state sent the policy signal of “curbing the barbaric growth of capital,”[22] a writer of WeChat public-account posts published an article predicting that “a profound social transformation is under way,” one that would strengthen state-owned enterprises, squeeze private enterprises, and revive socialism. This manifesto-like piece was not only cheered by the left-nationalist crowd but quickly reposted by authoritative official media such as CCTV and the People’s Daily. Its author came to be regarded as a kind of “state preceptor,” and for a while enjoyed unrivaled prominence. Strangely, though, only a few days later the authoritative official media all removed the article at once, and nationalist sentiment in public opinion was rapidly cooled down. Not long after, the state sent a policy signal directly opposite to the “curbing the barbaric growth of capital” of two years before: “encouraging and supporting patient capital.” I do not know whether that writer ever commented on this, or how. Few in public opinion seem to pay much attention to his voice any more. Recently, after Trump’s tariff war set off a global financial earthquake, a new post of his, “Facing This Battle of Life and Death and of National Destiny, What Means of Counterattack Does China Still Have?”, went viral online once again. It was as impassioned and indignant as ever, enough to make patriots’ blood boil. Yet compared with the same author’s article of a few years earlier, both its pitch and its momentum were much reduced, though it still had countless fans. To this I cannot help asking, in a small voice: whose national destiny? That of the poor, or of the rich? Of the bourgeoisie, or of the proletariat?

11
The bureaucratic class, the national bourgeoisie, and the petty-bourgeois left, together with some brainwashed people at the bottom of society, make up the core base of nationalism-statism.

12
I came across a view that the principal contradiction in society today has shifted from that between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to that between the bureaucratic class and the “negative-property class.”[23] Here are a few thoughts for discussion. The bureaucratic class is part of the bourgeoisie. The difference is that the latter owns the means of production directly, while the former controls them indirectly through power, so that the two form a single bureaucrat-capitalist community of interests. As for the “negative-property class,” it is the new form taken by the proletariat in today’s world under the oppression of the bureaucratic class and the exploitation of the bourgeoisie. It has not changed the proletariat; it has widened its scope and even its character (under the joint assault of the bureaucratic class and the bourgeoisie, for example, part of the petty bourgeoisie has been thrown into the ranks of the propertyless or the “negative-propertied”). So to say that the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is the principal contradiction is not outdated. It has only become more complicated than before.

13
The reason the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is still the principal contradiction of today’s world lies in the capitalist system itself. Whether capitalism appears as bureaucratic crony capitalism, as liberal capitalism, or in some other guise, so long as capitalist relations of production exist, class exploitation and oppression will not disappear. The contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie remains the irreconcilable principal contradiction, and the struggle between them remains a life-and-death struggle. This does not depend on anyone’s will.

14
Trump’s tariff war will very likely set off a new wave of nationalism in China. The CCTV Movie Channel will no doubt show Battle on Shangganling Mountain again and let the little pinks cheer for a while. And once Sino-US relations return to normal, the Movie Channel will bring out The Sun Also Rises Over the Yellow River, about Chinese and Americans fighting Japan side by side, and show it once more.[24] The people’s patriotic feelings swing back and forth between these two poles until they are exhausted.

15
Replacing class narrative and liberal narrative with nationalism, sustaining political legitimacy with “red culture,” and building a hierarchical “community” of interests through market fundamentalism: these are the three magic weapons by which the bureaucratic bourgeoisie wins.

16
I see some in the left-wing circle once again trotting out the Teacher’s famous line, “However long they want to fight, we will fight.”[25] I am speechless. Like children, these people remember the treats but never the beatings. Have they forgotten how often Mao statues have been torn down?

Random Thoughts (26)

Liu Jiming · March 30, 2025 · Source: Human Realm website

“Leftists” whose mission is to criticize capitalism, yet who criticize only private capital while clinging to state capital as if it were socialism, are as absurd as Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

1
The “Sima Nan affair”[1] has caused deep divisions within the broad left camp. Rather than creating a split in the left, it has exposed one. I agree with one netizen’s analysis: “It does not represent the defeat of the proletariat or of Marxism. On the contrary, it exposes the defeat of every kind of opportunism within the proletarian ranks.” And I would add that it may also split the national left (the nationalist left), which was riding high until recently, and lead some of its members out of the swamp of reformism to become genuine Marxist-Leninist-Maoist leftists.

2
A Marxist party that proclaims the realization of communism as its highest ideal, yet represents not the interests of workers, peasants, and the broad proletariat but those of the bourgeoisie and a small elite of the powerful, does not deserve to be called a “Communist Party.”

3
[Questions to think about] One: Why have official commemorations of Sun Yat-sen grown more and more lavish in recent years? Two: How did commemorating Sun Yat-sen in the Mao era differ from commemorating him today?

4
Living in an age like this, I often feel an urge to blow myself up.

5
Having your account banned is a revolutionary’s medal of honor.

6
The bourgeoisie and its running dogs are forever creating their own enemies and gravediggers.

7
The reason the modern Soviet revisionists were more reactionary than the Western bourgeoisie is that they seized and held power by deception and lies. Such rule was bound not to last. It would be overthrown either by its enemy within, the agents of the bourgeoisie it had fattened with its own hands, or by its enemy without, the awakened proletariat.

8
The animals had once clearly remembered that Snowball fought bravely in the “Battle of the Cowshed,” and was even awarded “Animal Hero, First Class.” But after Napoleon drove Snowball out, he declared him a traitor who had been in league with the farmer Jones. During the battle, he claimed, it was Snowball who had led the human invaders against the farm, and even the wounds on Snowball’s back were twisted into bites Napoleon himself had inflicted to stop the traitor. At first the animals were shocked and confused, for Snowball’s bravery had been plain for all to see. But under Napoleon’s constant propaganda and Squealer’s silver-tongued explanations, their memory of Snowball gradually blurred... Just as with the “Seven Commandments,” which were altered again and again, the animals lost their way completely in this rewritten past. They could only struggle to survive under ever-changing rules, and never again find the equal Animal Farm they once had. (Adapted from George Orwell, Animal Farm)[2]

9
While the poor are earnestly and tenderly discussing patriotism, the rich have long since quietly moved their wealth abroad.

10
[A question to think about] The penalty imposed on Sima Nan for tax evasion set the internet ablaze. Not only did every major official media outlet weigh in, but the whole country joined in a chorus of “beat him, kill him,” with a momentum that seemed to surpass even the denunciation of the Gang of Four. Within the left circle, too, it stirred fierce controversy. His supporters argue that this was “a hunt carefully planned by capital and the bureaucracy, killing several birds with one stone: first, discrediting Sima Nan; second, dividing and confusing the left camp; third, diverting public attention; fourth, covering up far greater crimes.” His critics argue that Sima Nan was never a leftist at all, but an opportunist “making a living off patriotism,” and that his fall means the state-capital bloc is abandoning the nationalist left and beginning to join forces with Western capital. Still others see the Sima Nan affair as a positive signal for “private enterprise,” or even for the economy. Which view do you agree with, and why?

11
According to the Marxist-Leninist theory of the state, the state is an instrument of class rule, and the army is the armed body that carries out the state’s will. In a state under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the army defends the interests of the proletariat; in a state under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, it defends the interests of the bourgeoisie. When the nature of the state changes, the nature of the army is bound to change too.

12
Under the White Terror, the early Communists had no choice but to spread and practice Marxism through secret societies. More than a hundred years later, everything seems to have come back to where it started.

13
I once said that writing is a form of struggle. That being so, it cannot be smooth sailing, all flowers and applause. It is bound to be strewn with thorns and traps, with open spears and hidden arrows impossible to guard against. So it was in Lu Xun’s time, and so it is in ours, or even more so; only the forms are different. In the past, newspaper offices were often shut down; today, the silencing and closing of websites and social media accounts is an everyday affair. Not being jailed or beheaded already counts as progress. That is why I say that having your account banned is a required course for every writer, and a revolutionary’s medal of honor.

14
The recent controversy over the Changsha Education Bureau in Hunan, which set aside a separate admissions track in the high-school entrance exams for the children of so-called “high-level talent,”[3] is no isolated case. Many localities have long had such “preferential” policies to attract talent and develop the economy. They were simply carried out quietly, without the fanfare of Changsha, which even publicized its policy through the media. The public seems to have grown used to it. For many years, those at the top have devoted themselves to precisely this: breaking down the equality of the past and re-dividing people, politically, economically, and culturally, into “poor” and “rich,” “high-level talent” and “low-level talent,” “low-end population,”[4] and even “garbage population,” an unequal society. Such a design does not merely contradict socialist values, whose practical goal is the equality of all. It runs counter even to the ideals of democracy, freedom, fairness, and justice under capitalism. It is nothing less than a modern version of India’s Brahmin caste system and of feudal hierarchies of privilege.

15
Patriotism is a sincere feeling for one’s country that comes from the heart. It cannot be imposed on anyone, just as no force on earth can compel one person to love another.

16
Lately many little pinks (including some masses who call themselves “leftists”) have been filled with righteous indignation over Li Ka-shing’s sale of his ports, denouncing him as unpatriotic, even as a traitor.[5] My view: the pursuit of profit is the nature of capital. That is what is meant by “capital has no fatherland.” A capitalist is capital personified. You cannot demand that Li Ka-shing love something that, for him, simply does not exist.

17
Whenever I see many of my proletarian brothers, whom the elites regard as the “low-end population,” using patriotism as a universal yardstick to measure every person and thing, I recall a line from Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England: “Even the poorest patriot in London’s East End, at the thought of England’s wealth and industry, cannot help puffing out his chest.”[6] And I come to understand more deeply Mr. Lu Xun’s attitude of “grieving at their misfortune, and raging at their failure to fight.”[7]

18
Mr. Sima Nan has been hailed by many netizens as a patriot, even a national hero, for exposing the loss of state assets. This is the moral ground on which some netizens defend him in the “tax-gate” scandal. I too believe that he may well have been the target of revenge by some faction. But I do not believe that a “patriot” enjoys any moral or legal superiority or immunity. Nor are state-owned and private enterprises opposed to each other as socialism is to capitalism, as many self-styled leftists believe. The former represents state capital, the latter private capital, and together they form essential parts of capitalist relations of production. “Leftists” whose mission is to criticize capitalism, yet who criticize only private capital while clinging to state capital as if it were socialism, are as absurd as Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

Translator’s notes

[1] The “Sima Nan affair”: in early 2025, the nationalist commentator Sima Nan was fined for tax evasion, setting off a fierce public controversy.

[2] The Animal Farm passage: a Chinese plot summary of the novel, not Orwell’s own words, translated here from the Chinese.

[3] The Changsha admissions controversy (2025): the Changsha Education Bureau announced a separate quota in the senior high-school entrance exam (中考) for the children of officially designated “high-level talent,” provoking a public outcry.

[4] “Low-end population” (低端人口): a phrase that became notorious during Beijing’s mass eviction of migrant workers in late 2017.

[5] Li Ka-shing’s ports: in March 2025, Li Ka-shing’s CK Hutchison agreed to sell most of its global port business, including two ports on the Panama Canal, to a consortium led by BlackRock, which drew sharp criticism from Chinese official media.

[6] The Engels quotation: translated from the author’s Chinese, and possibly a paraphrase rather than Engels’s exact words.

[7] “Grieving at their misfortune, raging at their failure to fight” (哀其不幸，怒其不争): Lu Xun’s phrase from “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (1908), long used to sum up his attitude toward the Chinese masses.

Random Thoughts (25)

Liu Jiming · March 11, 2025 · Source: Human Realm website

1
The “Two Sessions”[1] ought to be a time that encourages the public to care about and discuss the affairs of the nation. Instead it has been turned into a time of “Do not discuss affairs of state.”[2]

2
If you could really travel back to 1921 and meet the delegates to the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which question would you most want to ask them? 1. What was your original aspiration in founding the Party? 2. Do you regret joining the revolution? 3. Is this “golden age” what you hoped for?

3
Being a leftist does not mean clamoring for cheap patriotism all day long. It means always observing and criticizing reality from the standpoint of the great majority of working people, and crying out and struggling for the freedom and liberation of the proletariat.

4
I find it strange that so many people curse Mo Yan as a traitor. In fact, he loves this country, which treats him as an honored guest, far more than the people who curse him do. In his eyes, are you even worthy[3] of loving the country?

5
Ne Zha 2 has been treated as an aphrodisiac for nationalism.[4] This may be the marketing team’s deliberate doing. Otherwise, had the authorities grasped the film’s real themes, that “to rebel is justified” and that “where there is oppression, there is resistance,”[5] they would not have mobilized the mainstream media to promote it and organized people to watch it. They would have banned it.

6
Commentary on Ne Zha 2 in public discourse has taken two sharply different directions. One is the mainstream nationalist narrative of resisting American hegemony; the other is the left’s revolutionary narrative of resisting class oppression. At present, under the twin pressure of power and capital, the second view has gradually been drowned out by the first.

7
In Ne Zha 2, the proletariat sees that “to rebel is justified,” while nationalists see a contest for supremacy against America. Each takes what it needs. This divergence reflects the essential nature of works of art, and is also a projection of present-day reality and social sentiment.

8
When the modern revisionists and their running dogs see words like “class struggle” or “class oppression and exploitation,” they react like Li Gui running into Li Kui:[6] such words must be banned at all costs.

Although I do not agree with Mr. Zhang Hongliang’s characterization of a “Trump revolution,”[7] neither do I agree with this article’s view of the law as supreme. Lenin long ago pointed out that law is an instrument of class rule. Whether in a bourgeois revolution (or reform) or in continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, to touch the interests of a privileged group one must first break through the shackles of the law. In fact, the very part for which the author attacks Mr. Zhang is the part I agree with. For example, Musk’s “little generals” bypassing both houses of Congress and entering government agencies to audit their books[8] really does somewhat resemble “kicking aside the Party committees to make revolution”[9] in the Cultural Revolution, even though the aims of the two are entirely different.

9
I do not agree with the criticism of Mr. Zhang Hongliang as “left in form but right in essence.” Nor do I accept the view that Trump and Musk are staging an “American Cultural Revolution.” The difference between the two is not only that one is a bourgeois revolution (or reform) and the other continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, each serving to consolidate and develop the rule of its own class. They also differ in form. The former is an elitist reform movement launched and led by Trump and Musk, without any form of mass participation. The latter was a genuine movement of mass democracy, launched by the leader from the top down and joined by the whole people, which sought to change not merely the ills of the bureaucratic system but the feudal notions of hierarchy and private ownership rooted in people’s minds for thousands of years. The recent dispute within the left camp between “pro-Trump-Musk” and “anti-Trump-Musk” factions is a symptom that the long-standing divergence, even struggle, between the so-called “establishment” and “anti-establishment” factions has become more open and more intense.

10
Many people pin their hopes on a bourgeois politician like Trump because they no longer hold out any hope for present-day politics, or for the proletariat winning through traditional revolution. That is true of the left, and is it not equally true of the right? And despair is often the seed of new hope.

11
In Chinese films, the state always stands for justice. In many Western films, the state not only fails to stand for justice but often aids the tyrant in his cruelty and becomes a refuge for the forces of evil. When the law, as the embodiment of the state’s will, cannot uphold justice, the people will seek a solution in their own way, and resistance carries a kind of natural legitimacy. So it has been from Robin Hood in the past to Snowden in the present.

12
The public intellectuals seem to have lost ground in public opinion. But having dug in deep within the system for more than forty years, they have their people at every key point of power, from politics, business, and academia to the arts. And with the great tree of the West to lean on, they are full of confidence, sure that once the situation changes, the world will surely be theirs.

13
The bureaucratic class is not an independent class. In the Mao era it was attached to the proletariat, but its selfish and greedy nature gives it a natural affinity with the bourgeoisie. In the post-Mao era, the bureaucratic class shows a double face. On the one hand, it nurtured and fattened the bourgeoisie with its own hands. On the other, when the now-powerful bourgeoisie sought political leadership, the bureaucratic class disciplined and suppressed it in order to preserve its own rule, and sharp contradictions arose between them. But these contradictions cannot change the symbiotic relationship that actually exists between the two.

14
The contemporary Chinese bourgeoisie divides into a national bourgeoisie and a liberal bourgeoisie. The former is the main defender of the bureaucratic class and of nationalism. The latter, because it admires Western democracy and neoliberalism, finds its contradictions with the bureaucratic class and the national bourgeoisie growing ever more irreconcilable. This places the proletariat and the liberal bourgeoisie alike in the position of being oppressed by the bureaucratic class, and makes it possible for these two classes, originally exploiter and exploited, to unite in a movement of mass democracy.

15
“To stop the mouths of the people is like damming a river: better to channel it than to block it.”[10] Even the ancients understood this. Why is it that some people today do not?

16
I have been testing their bottom line all along. Who knew they had no bottom line at all?

Translator’s notes

[1] The “Two Sessions” (两会): the annual March meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

[2] “Do not discuss affairs of state” (莫谈国事): a warning once posted on the walls of teahouses in old China, made famous by Lao She’s play Teahouse.

[3] “Even worthy” (也配): a sneer made famous by Lu Xun. Here Liu turns it back on Mo Yan’s critics.

[4] Ne Zha 2 (《哪吒之魔童闹海》, 2025): the highest-grossing animated film in history, heavily promoted by official media as a symbol of national pride.

[5] “To rebel is justified” (造反有理) and “where there is oppression, there is resistance” (哪里有压迫，哪里就有反抗): the first is Mao’s famous Cultural Revolution maxim; the second is a common revolutionary slogan.

[6] Li Gui and Li Kui (李鬼、李逵): in Water Margin, the bandit Li Gui robs travelers by impersonating the hero Li Kui, until he runs into the real one.

[7] Zhang Hongliang (张宏良): a prominent Maoist commentator and retired professor at Minzu University of China, who in early 2025 described Trump’s program as a “revolution.”

[8] Musk’s “little generals” (马斯克的小将们): the young engineers of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Little generals” (小将) was the term of praise for Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

[9] “Kicking aside the Party committees to make revolution” (踢开党委闹革命): a Cultural Revolution slogan for rebels bypassing the regular Party apparatus.

[10] “To stop the mouths of the people is like damming a river”: from the Discourses of the States (《国语》), the minister Duke Shao’s warning to King Li of Zhou, who had banned all criticism and was later driven out by a popular uprising.

Random Thoughts (24)

Liu Jiming · March 4, 2025 · Source: Human Realm website

1
This morning I watched Ne Zha 2: The Demon Child Conquers the Sea. Beyond the visual shock of its high-tech production, my strongest impression was that the film carries on the theme of “where there is oppression, there is resistance” from the animated films Havoc in Heaven and Nezha Conquers the Dragon King,[1] released in the 1960s and 70s. From Ne Zha’s cry of “My fate is mine to decide, not Heaven’s” in Ne Zha to “If the world is unjust, I will turn heaven and earth upside down” in Ne Zha 2, the films show that contemporary society has moved from the awakening of the individual into a new stage, the awakening of class. At a time when Chinese literature is still sunk in the sleep-talk of post-Scar literature[2] and cannot pull itself free, the birth of Ne Zha 2 carries an important lesson.

2
In the first thirty years, landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists[3] were objects of dictatorship. Ordinarily they were supervised by the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and on every holiday or important meeting they were warned: “You are only allowed to behave yourselves; you are not allowed to speak or act out of turn.”[4] Now, in the new era of Reform and Opening, on every holiday or important meeting, I too receive similar warnings from time to time from the relevant departments, such as “Be careful what you say” or “Do not take part in such-and-such an event,” much as a parent scolds a child. Even an invitation to give a lecture somewhere earns me “special attention.” My status is much the same as that of the landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists back then, except that the objects of dictatorship have been completely reversed, and one more line has been added: “It’s all for your own good!” It seems that, compared with the dictatorship of the proletariat, the people’s democratic dictatorship does have a little more of the human touch.

3
“It’s all for your own good.” Now when I hear that line, I can’t help wanting to throw up.

4
For more than forty years, the mainstream narrative pattern in films depicting a century of Chinese history has been, in essence: the Republic was a golden age teeming with elites; the first thirty years of New China were a dark iron age[5] in which the elites suffered; and the latter thirty years are the elites’ golden age. And the people? “We are the people!” say the elites.

5
The so-called principle that “the two thirty-year periods must not be used to negate each other”[6] is the new era’s inheritance and development of “no debate.”[7] Its real point is that “the first thirty years must not be used to negate the latter thirty” (in reality, the first thirty years have already been negated almost entirely, so there is no need to stress that side). Its aim is single: to follow neither “the old road of isolation and rigidity” nor “the wrong road of changing our banner,”[8] and to carry Reform and Opening through to the end!

6
Since some people online are spreading the rumor that I support the netizen Mao Xinghuo’s lawsuit against Mo Yan,[9] I wish to restate my views. First, Mo Yan’s literary talent and achievement, and his standing and influence in contemporary Chinese letters, are an objective fact, reinforced by present-day politics, and they will not change because of public criticism. Second, Mo Yan’s works may be discussed and criticized, but I do not approve of the public subjecting him to cyber-mobbing, let alone lawsuits. Third, the crux of Mo Yan’s works and of certain of his views is not that he smears the Eighth Route Army and glorifies the Japanese army, nor that he betrays the country, nor that he “only criticizes society and never praises it.” It is that he uses the latter thirty years to negate and stigmatize the socialist revolution and construction of the first thirty. This position has always been dominant in Chinese literary circles, and Mo Yan is merely its representative.

7
Many Mo Yan fans praise his critical courage and liberal stance in refusing to flatter his superiors or the officials, while at the same time defending him by pointing to his invitations to the Forum on Literature and Art and the National Day reception, and to his official title as vice-chairman of the China Writers Association. What a split personality.

8
Wei Wei once said that the twenty-first century would be a century of suffering for Marxist-Leninist-Maoists. The rise and fall of China Workers Net, Red China Net, and then Jiliu Net[10] give a glimpse of how hard the left’s struggle forward has been. But however harsh the repression, those who bear witness to their age will surely see the day when the communist movement rises again. The Internationale shall surely be realized![11]

9
Western bourgeois democracy means: you may speak, but I decide what gets done. Soviet revisionism means: you may not speak, you may not act, and I will be master of the house on your behalf.

10
Those who stigmatize socialism most are often not the bourgeoisie, but certain people who call themselves socialists and pretend to believe in communism. They excel at worshipping the worst kind of capitalism as socialism, and in the end they ruin the name of socialism and of capitalism alike. They are the most insidious enemies of both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

11
For many little pinks, and even for some who call themselves leftists, art that criticizes reality and exposes the darkness is the work of “rebels.” It leaves one speechless.

12
When the shared faith of an era is suddenly wiped to zero, all its striving, including its ways of living (collectivism, communism, selfless devotion to the public good, finding joy in helping others, thrift, putting others before oneself), turns into suffering to be denounced. And its values, including “to rebel is justified,” “fight self-interest, criticize revisionism,”[12] and “where there is oppression, there is resistance,” turn into notions that are hopelessly foolish, even absurd.

13
The storm Trump has stirred up is, of course, meant to clear away the long-accumulated ills of the capitalist system and restore vigor to a troubled American politics, but it cannot change the exploited and oppressed position of the proletariat. Still, he is far better than the likes of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, because the former is an outstanding bourgeois reformer, while the latter were shameful traitors to socialism and the proletariat.

14
That AI and information technology are being used ever more widely to shut down public speech is the most worrying, and the saddest, condition of contemporary society.

15
The saddest thing for a politician is not to lack power, but to have it without knowing what to do with it or how, hesitating and dithering, anxious about gain and loss, and wasting the great opportunity history has handed him. Great politicians are the very opposite. They have the wisdom to gain power, and lofty and far-reaching ambitions, and the courage to hack through thorns and never yield however many times they are beaten back. To realize their ideals they care nothing for praise or blame, and will not hesitate even if they are smashed to pieces, struggling on to their very last breath.

16
China’s media people (including the whole mainstream elite and the bureaucratic clique) are not only rotten through, but evil through and through.

Translator’s notes

[1] Havoc in Heaven (《大闹天宫》, 1961–64) and Nezha Conquers the Dragon King (《哪吒闹海》, 1979): classic films from the Shanghai Animation Film Studio.

[2] “Post-Scar literature” (后伤痕文学): writing in the tradition of the “Scar literature” of the late 1970s, which recounted the sufferings of the Cultural Revolution.

[3] Landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists (地富反坏右): the “Five Black Categories,” classes of people subject to political control in the Mao era.

[4] “You are only allowed to behave yourselves...”: from Mao’s “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” (1949), where it is addressed to the reactionary classes.

[5] “Golden age... iron age” (黄金时代、黑铁时代): an echo of Hesiod’s ages of man, popularized in China by Wang Xiaobo’s novellas The Golden Age and The Iron Age.

[6] “The two thirty-year periods must not negate each other” (两个三十年不能互相否定): Xi Jinping’s formulation of January 2013 on the relation between the Mao era and the Reform era.

[7] “No debate” (不争论): Deng Xiaoping’s injunction, in his 1992 Southern Tour talks, not to argue over whether reforms were “capitalist” or “socialist.”

[8] “Old road of isolation and rigidity... wrong road of changing our banner”: from Hu Jintao’s report to the Eighteenth Party Congress (2012).

[9] Mao Xinghuo (毛星火): a nationalist blogger who in 2023 attempted to sue Mo Yan, accusing his novels of insulting the Eighth Route Army and glorifying Japanese invaders.

[10] China Workers Net, Red China Net, Jiliu Net (中国工人网、红色中国网、激流网): Maoist and left-wing websites that were repeatedly shut down.

[11] “The Internationale shall surely be realized” (英特纳雄耐尔一定会实现): from the last line of the Chinese version of “The Internationale,” in which 英特纳雄耐尔 is a phonetic rendering of “Internationale,” standing for the ideal of international communism.

[12] “Fight self-interest, criticize revisionism” (斗私批修): a Cultural Revolution slogan of Mao’s from 1967.

Random Thoughts (23)

Liu Jiming · February 8, 2025 · Source: Human Realm website

The fall of German fascism and the collapse of Soviet revisionism prove a truth: rule upheld by force and lies cannot last.

1
Yesterday I wrote a Weibo post saying that I particularly loathe a certain historical figure, without saying who. To my surprise, when I woke up, the post had been blocked. I was baffled. Why would they block it? On what grounds did they decide whom I hated? Or even if the person I hate really is the one they think, does that mean the post must be blocked? I felt an absurdity and an anger beyond words. Love and hate are both a capacity and a right. To say we love one person is also to say we hate another. When both these rights are taken away, can a human being still be called human?

2
Some people, pointing to the all-powerful information surveillance of the bourgeois state machine, reject class struggle and Lenin’s theory of the vanguard wholesale. They argue that the reformism of so-called “legal struggle” is the only road by which the proletariat can win its own liberation, and they slander intellectuals who hold to a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist position as “Descenders”[1] and “old leftist geezers hiding in the shadows directing others to storm the tower.”[2] It is time to put an end to such revisionist clichés.

3
I am no literary giant. If, when the lid is closed on my coffin, I can be called “a communist fighter,” even a fighter with flaws, that will be enough.

4
[A question to think about] The similarities and differences between reform and opening in Vietnam and in China. One, the similarity: both uphold the leadership of the Communist Party. Two, the differences: (1) the “seventy-thirty” verdict on the nation’s founding leader;[3] (2) public disclosure of officials’ assets. Do you think this is right?

5
In China, there are many criteria for telling a proletarian party from a bourgeois one, or for judging whether someone is a true Marxist. One of them is the attitude toward Confucius.[4]

6
The so-called middle-of-the-roaders are the geese of Goose Town:[5] they run after whoever is strongest.

7
The masses are not “middle-of-the-roaders.” Many of them have simply not yet awakened, poisoned as they are by bourgeois culture. But sooner or later they will awaken; the cruelty of the exploiters and oppressors will force them to. And once they take up the powerful intellectual weapon of Marxism, they will grow into a new revolutionary subject driving society forward.

8
Among the figures of Chinese history, I have seldom loathed anyone so much that I cannot even bring myself to speak his name, let alone call him “comrade,” lest I sully that warm form of address with its particular political meaning. You know whom I mean.

9
This year marks the 101st anniversary of the death of Lenin, the great teacher of the proletarian revolution. Let us revisit his teachings: “All doctrines of non-class socialism and non-class politics are sheer nonsense.” “Anyone who still talks of non-class politics and non-class socialism deserves only to be put in a cage and exhibited next to the Australian kangaroo.”[6]

10
Everyone has the right to live a good life of their own. But there should also be people who cry out and struggle not just so that they themselves can live well, but so that the great majority can “live well” too.

11
When the bourgeoisie uses nationalist rhetoric to get itself off the hook, it shows that they have come to the end of the road.

12
Is this what is meant by “the ultra-left turning ultra-right”: if we cannot have real socialism, then let us have real capitalism; or, better real capitalism than fake socialism?

13
I had not watched the Network News[7] for a long time. When I happened to catch it the other day, everything from the anchors’ clothes and tone of voice to the program’s lineup struck me as just like the Spring Festival Gala, and very comical.

14
I tried having DeepSeek[8] answer a few questions and write a few articles. I found the results rather shallow and one-dimensional, badly formulaic and repetitive. It is suited to low-level official documents and practical writing, or as a search tool, but it cannot handle more complex writing. Still less does it have the depth and independent thinking that only human beings can possess, or the ability to replace literary and artistic creation, which values creativity and individuality above all.

15
An article written by DeepSeek, though perfectly balanced and safe, seems to show more tolerance and respect toward the “Maoists” than the mainstream media, which treat them as heretics.

16
[A question to think about] What impact will the rapid advance of artificial intelligence have on society? First, it will push the productive forces to a higher level, while wealth and resources of every kind become further concentrated in the hands of a small elite. The gap between rich and poor will become more glaring, and social contradictions will sharpen further. Second, as intelligent robots come into wide use in production and daily life, large numbers of the petty bourgeoisie and small producers will lose their jobs and be thrown into the ranks of the proletariat, and the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will enter a period of full-scale eruption. Third, because the bourgeoisie and its state machine use artificial intelligence and information technology to control society completely, the proletariat is no longer likely to seize power through traditional revolution. It must find new forms of struggle: for example, using artificial intelligence to break the bourgeoisie’s control of information, threaten its security, and even deal it a devastating blow, forcing it to give up, or even share with the whole people, the rights and resources it holds. This would bring about a vast transformation of the relations of production, and even of the system of ownership. In that case, the “association of free individuals” foretold by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto would become reality. This may be the last choice human society faces: either destruction, or communism!

17
When DeepSeek answers questions about major historical events and figures, it still follows the mainstream narrative. This not only bears out Marx’s thesis that “the ruling ideas of a society are necessarily the ideas of the ruling class,”[9] but also proves that all science and technology, artificial intelligence included, are instruments of the ruling class.

18
The fall of German fascism and the collapse of Soviet revisionism prove a truth: rule upheld by force and lies cannot last.

19
Later generations will judge the “Ten Years of the Great Revolution”[10] completely differently from today. It was not, as is now said, an error or a stain on Mao Zedong’s life, but the shining summit of his great political practice and thought, which will forever light the road to the liberation of the proletariat and of all humanity, like a lighthouse.

Translator’s notes

[1] “Descenders” (降临派): from Liu Cixin’s science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem, a faction of humans who welcome an alien invasion in the hope that it will destroy human civilization. Used online for people supposedly hoping for social collapse.

[2] “Storm the tower” (冲塔): internet slang, borrowed from video games, for openly defying the authorities or provoking the censors. “Old geezers” (老登) is dismissive slang for older men.

[3] “Seventy-thirty” (三七开): a verdict of “70 percent achievements, 30 percent mistakes,” the formula the Communist Party of China adopted for Mao in its 1981 Resolution on History, following Mao’s own verdict on Stalin. Vietnam has not issued such a verdict on Ho Chi Minh.

[4] The attitude toward Confucius: in the Mao era, Confucianism was attacked as feudal ideology, culminating in the 1973–74 campaign to “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius.” Since the 1990s, Confucius has been officially rehabilitated as a symbol of Chinese culture.

[5] Goose Town (鹅城): the town in Jiang Wen’s film Let the Bullets Fly (2010), whose townspeople side with whoever looks stronger.

[6] The Lenin quotations: the second comes from Lenin’s “Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (1919). Both are translated here from Liu’s Chinese.

[7] Network News (新闻联播): China Central Television’s flagship evening news program.

[8] DeepSeek: the Chinese AI chatbot whose release in January 2025 drew worldwide attention. The original abbreviates it as “DS.”

[9] “The ruling ideas”: after Marx and Engels in The German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”

[10] “Ten Years of the Great Revolution” (十年大革命): the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which official discourse calls the “ten years of catastrophe” (十年浩劫).

Random Thoughts (22)

Liu Jiming · January 19, 2025 · Source: Human Realm website

Either socialism or capitalism: is there any better choice than these?

1
Today is Christmas, and tomorrow is “People’s Day,” a name more and more widely accepted by those who love Chairman Mao. For my part, I would rather call December 26 “Eastern Sage’s Day.” Jesus is a sage made by Westerners, so Christmas ought to be called “Western Sage’s Day.”[1] Mao Zedong is the great teacher of the proletariat and of the oppressed nations and peoples of the East, and from the standpoint of geopolitics and world civilization, he is greater than Jesus. So to set “Eastern Sage’s Day” against “Western Sage’s Day” is more fitting, and more meaningful.

2
Because the word “people” has been commandeered by the elite classes, its features have long since become hollow and blurred. When “Belt” Xu and Jack Ma,[2] whose wealth rivals that of nations, belong to “the people” alongside poor losers[3] whose yearly income would not buy a single square meter of housing in Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen, the word loses its original political meaning. And the name “People’s Day” loses any real point of reference.

3
A netizen asked: will robot dogs, robot chickens, robot beasts of burden, and robots take over human labor? My answer: I believe they will, and in some places this is already happening. But I also believe that it will leave the crony-capitalist interest groups sitting on the mouth of a volcano, living in constant dread. For when the exploited and oppressed are hungry and cold with nowhere left to turn, their anger will erupt like a volcano. The propertyless will once again become the makers of history and, as “The Internationale” sings, “smash the old world to pieces,” “arise, ye slaves, arise,” and usher in a truly new world without oppression or exploitation!

4
Some people were surprised, even puzzled, that I made my personal WeChat public on Weibo, so let me explain. Most of my WeChat contacts are former colleagues from inside the system and fellow writers from the literary world, a miniature of my past social relations. But as I set out on a road completely different from before, many of these “friends” drifted away, or even became opponents, until we were strangers to each other. My WeChat Moments feed has less and less to do with my inner life. Every December 26, I can hardly find a single post commemorating Chairman Mao, let alone articles from anyone whose position is close to mine. I feel like an undercover agent in the “white area,”[4] planted in the enemy camp. Some objectionable “friends” I have had to set to “hide their posts.” But running away is not in my nature. Today every online platform is a battlefield, not to be given up lightly. That is why I made my WeChat public. I call it “Operation Redden.” As one netizen commented: “This is Teacher Liu carrying on the Teacher’s[5] method, with an innovative twist: unite the masses online, boldly mobilize the masses!” In fact, since I posted my WeChat last night, hundreds of netizens have poured into my Moments, and what was a white, even black, feed has quickly turned red. I hope that this change from black and white to red happens not only in my Moments but in real society too, so that, as Mr. Li Dazhao said, we build anew “a world of red flags.”[6]

5
[A question to think about] “Monk Kong”[7] says that from 1949 to 1957, “we” were carrying on and realizing Mr. Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People, that is, New Democracy, which is to say capitalism, and doing it well. So after 1978, “we” in fact returned politically, economically, and culturally to the “correct line” of before 1957, that is, before the Eighth Party Congress: what Party history calls the “New Democratic order,” and what today’s mainstream discourse calls socialism with Chinese characteristics. And “we” have followed that road all the way to today. So here is the question: in these forty-odd years since Reform and Opening, have “we” done better or worse than in Chairman Mao’s years from 1949 to 1957? Both being “New Democracy,” what is the difference between them?

6
The “new era” is barely a little over ten years old, yet “new-era literature” has somehow become a hot research topic. Not only are theorists arguing endlessly over how to periodize it, but a magnificent tome titled A History of Chinese Literature in the New Era is about to appear. China has had a tradition of writing history since ancient times, but I still marvel at the speed and the high pitch with which contemporary literary historians write theirs. I am all the more astonished to find that many of the scholars of “new-era literature” were once eager champions of “literature of the bottom layer.”[8] I have not yet seen this “history of new-era literature” that is about to be launched with such ceremony, but I am sure there will be no place in it for “the bottom,” just as “the proletariat” has long since vanished from mainstream discourse, even though the poor have not disappeared in reality and indeed are multiplying as the rich multiply. Ah yes, we are blessed to live in a golden age; how could we let darkness sully the light? New-era literature must be the literature of a golden age. Blessed are the writers of the golden age, and blessed are the people of the golden age. Amen.

7
When the ruling class blocks every path to social reform, revolution becomes inevitable. There are only two ways a revolution can come: a coup launched from the upper ranks of the ruling group, or an armed uprising from the lower ranks of society. It must be one or the other. An uprising can be called a revolution only when it drives society forward; otherwise it can only be called a restoration. Coups may be revolutionary or counter-revolutionary: the Xi’an Incident, 18 Brumaire, the September 13 Incident, and the Bingchen Incident, for example.[9] The revolutionary side can make use of them, and so can the counter-revolutionary side.

8
Only when state power is in the hands of the proletariat can a cultural revolution be called a revolution. If power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie, it can only be called a catastrophe or turmoil.

9
[A question to think about] Most leftists and rightists are as irreconcilable as fire and water in their attitude toward Mao Zedong, yet they seem to agree in criticizing “the Way of Confucius and Mencius.” Why is that?

10
Since 2020 I have paid little attention to the public intellectuals, and only recently heard something about the so-called “Chiang Mai housing affair.” A group of public intellectuals, wanting to “run”[10] abroad, banded together for warmth under the lead of Ye Fu, a fellow alumnus of mine from Wuhan University, to build a “Noah’s Ark” for hard times. In the end they fell out over money and turned the whole thing into a squabbling farce, their lofty public images shattered on the ground. One can’t help laughing. It seems the public intellectuals’ good days really are far behind them.

11
Real confidence is shown not only by letting foreign netizens pour in,[11] but by letting our own netizens go out freely, see the real world, and make their own voices heard.

12
[A question to think about] Either socialism or capitalism: is there any better choice than these?

13
In this age of global capitalization, “the mainstream” means the exploiting and oppressing classes and their dependents, and “the non-mainstream” means the exploited and oppressed classes and their spokesmen. Old Hu,[12] does my definition count as a grave provocation from a “left-wing spokesman”?

14
The principal contradiction of today’s world is not the so-called contradiction between elites and masses, but that between the exploiting and oppressing classes and the exploited and oppressed classes.

15
The ultra-left is simply the radical left. In a sense, without the “ultra-left” there would be no revolution. The first generation of Communists, from Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu to Mao Zedong, were all “ultra-leftists.”

Translator’s notes

[1] “Eastern Sage’s Day” (东圣节): a play on the Chinese word for Christmas, 圣诞节, literally “the Sage’s Birthday.” December 26 is Mao’s birthday, which some of his admirers celebrate as “People’s Day.”

[2] “Belt” Xu and Jack Ma: Xu Jiayin, founder of the Evergrande Group, mocked online as “Belt Xu” after photos of his high-hitched belt went viral; and Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba.

[3] “Poor losers” (穷屌丝): diaosi, internet slang for young men with no money, status, or prospects, often used self-mockingly.

[4] “White area” (白区): territory controlled by the Nationalists during the revolutionary period, where the Communists worked underground.

[5] “The Teacher” (教员): an affectionate online nickname for Mao.

[6] “A world of red flags”: from Li Dazhao’s 1918 essay “The Victory of Bolshevism”: “Look at the world to come: it will surely be a world of red flags!”

[7] “Monk Kong” (孔和尚):  an nickname, generally taken to refer to Kong Kingdong, Professor of Beijing University

[8] “Literature of the bottom layer” (底层文学): a literary current of the 2000s depicting the lives of laid-off workers, migrant laborers, and the rural poor, of which Liu Jiming was a leading figure.

[9] The coups: the Xi’an Incident (1936), in which Chiang Kai-shek was detained by his own generals and forced into a united front with the Communists; Napoleon’s coup of 18 Brumaire (1799); the September 13 Incident (1971), in which Lin Biao died in a plane crash after an alleged coup attempt; and the Bingchen Incident (1976, the year bingchen in the Chinese calendar), the arrest of the “Gang of Four” a month after Mao’s death.

[10] “Run” (润): internet slang for emigrating from China, from the pun rùn / “run.”

[11] “Letting foreign netizens pour in”: in January 2025, as a TikTok ban loomed, large numbers of American users moved to the Chinese app Xiaohongshu (RedNote), which official media hailed as a sign of China’s openness.

[12] Old Hu (老胡): Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the Global Times.

Selected Random Thoughts (22)

Liu Jiming · February 25, 2025 · Source: Human Realm Institute (WeChat public account)

“The bureaucratic class” and “capitalist roaders”[1] were two important concepts during the Ten Years of the Great Revolution, often used in overlapping and even interchangeable ways, as in the famous formulation “The veteran cadres are democrats, and the democrats are capitalist roaders.”[2] The selfish and greedy nature of the bureaucratic class gives it a natural affinity with capitalism. This is also an important reason why the communist movement of the twentieth century fell, one country after another. In this sense, the Ten Years of the Great Revolution really did have the typical features of a movement of mass democracy. A movement of mass democracy is an alliance across classes against a powerful bureaucratic class. It may be what changing present-day politics inevitably requires, a great struggle with the features of a new era. But even if it wins, this “alliance across classes” is bound to split, because the proletariat and the bourgeoisie each have their own interests and positions. The left must see this clearly.

Translator’s notes

[1] “Capitalist roaders” (走资派): short for “those in power within the Party who are taking the capitalist road,” the main target of the Cultural Revolution.

[2] “The veteran cadres are democrats...”: a remark attributed to Mao in 1976, referring to old cadres who, having been “bourgeois democrats” during the New Democratic Revolution, did not want to go on to socialist revolution.

Random Thoughts (21)

Liu Jiming · December 30, 2024 · Source: Human Realm website

To use certain of Chairman Mao’s remarks, which had a specific historical meaning, to endorse nationalism-statism is a shameful betrayal of Marxism and the proletariat by certain “leftists” today.

1
Before 2020, the contradiction between the left and the liberals was the principal contradiction, and that with nationalism-statism was secondary. After 2020, as the public intellectuals were gradually pushed to the margins of public discourse, nationalism-statism rose to become the main current. Its social base is the bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois groups found both inside and outside the system (including both the national left and the national right). The left’s contradiction with nationalism-statism has therefore risen to become the principal contradiction, and its contradiction with the liberals has fallen to a secondary one.

2
“The capitalists, naturally, spring into action. They appeal to their compatriots of the lower orders and begin to shout about the ‘fatherland,’ passing off their own private affairs as the affairs of the whole nation.”[1] No wonder the bourgeoisie and all revisionists hate Stalin so much.

3
“In such schools, the young generation of workers and peasants was not so much educated as enslaved by the bourgeoisie. The aim of educating these young people was to train servants useful to the bourgeoisie, able to make profits for it without disturbing its peace and leisure.” This passage from Lenin’s “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues”[2] would make a fitting gift for Zhang Guimei’s fans.[3]

4
To use certain of Chairman Mao’s remarks, which had a specific historical meaning, to endorse nationalism-statism is a shameful betrayal of Marxism and the proletariat by certain “leftists” today.

5
The charge of “historical nihilism”[4] used to be pinned on the public intellectuals. Now most public intellectuals have gone into hiding and it can no longer be pinned on them, yet historical nihilism is growing worse and worse. We discover that those truly practicing historical nihilism were never the public intellectuals, but the system itself.

6
Turning revolutionary culture into a consumer good is a new form of historical nihilism and an inevitable result of the globalization of capital. Far from spreading and promoting revolutionary culture, as the mainstream claims, it only drains the red from the revolution and turns it into a pink culture made for consumption.

7
Only in continuous practical struggle can the revolutionary soul and the true original aspiration be reawakened, and revolutionary culture brought back from the museum into reality, transformed from a bourgeois consumer culture back into a weapon of proletarian struggle. This is the mission that every believer in communism and every heir to China’s socialist revolution and construction must take up, and the young, above all, should take it up of their own accord.

8
Rulers always like to claim the people’s support, and to represent the people, as the source of their legitimacy, yet they never say what exactly “the people” means. If the people do not form a single whole, and harbor irreconcilable contradictions within, which part of “the people” do you represent? Bourgeois politicians cannot answer this question, because the moment they gave a truthful answer, the foundation of their rule would collapse.

9
I recently read an article by Mr. Qin Hui saying that nationalism is “benign” only when it “fights for sovereignty abroad and for human rights at home.”[5] This probably represents the view of most on the right. My view is that nationalism is “benign,” and acceptable, only on the condition that the leadership and the position as subject, political, economic, and cultural, which the constitution grants to the proletariat and the broad masses of working people, are guaranteed.

10
More than ten years ago, when I founded the magazine Tianxia,[6] I set out its editorial creed as “plural perspectives, a Chinese standpoint, a concern for all under heaven,” and promoted dialogue between left and right, between the academy and the grassroots. Besides New Left figures such as Wang Hui, Han Yuhai, Wang Xiaoming, Han Shaogong, and Li Tuo, its editorial board included liberals such as Qin Hui, Xiao Gongqin, and Xu Jilin. Even so, some right-wing literati accused Tianxia of being too far left, and lumped it together with Dushu and Tianya as strongholds of the New Left. It was from then on that certain right-wing literati in Hubei came to regard me as an ultra-leftist and a thorn in their side, someone to be got rid of at the first chance. So much for the tolerance of the right, which always claims to stand for freedom and inclusiveness.

11
At the present stage, the left’s main battlefield is the internet, and the so-called “online left” are the protagonists of the struggle. When the main battlefield will shift from the internet to the real world depends on subjective and objective conditions. To move too early is left-adventurism; to move too late is right-conservatism.

12
Tong Xiangling is gone, and Xie Fang is gone too...[7] But Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and The Song of Youth, Yang Zirong and Lin Daojing, live on forever. That generation of red classics lives forever, and the revolution lives forever.

13
Besides The Song of Youth, Xie Fang’s best-known films include Tear Stains, a Scar film that was all the rage after Reform and Opening began. But most audiences today still remember the former. Likewise, besides The White-Haired Girl, “Song of Lei Feng,” and “Return to Yan’an,” the famous poet He Jingzhi’s best-known works include “China’s October,” a long poem celebrating the “smashing of the Gang of Four.” But most readers still remember the former.[8] The elites have their selective memory, and the people have theirs. It is in this sense that we can say history (including the history of literature and art) is written by the people.

14
Tested by practice, the judgment that “the veteran cadres are democrats, and the democrats are capitalist roaders”[9] has proved absolutely true. It did them no injustice whatsoever.

15
[A question to think about] In the past, the “family planning” policy forced people to be sterilized, imposed fines, seized their pigs, and dismissed them from public posts, each measure crueler than the last, to the point of slogans like “If they hang themselves, don’t untie the rope; if they drink pesticide, don’t take away the bottle.”[10] And now? Everything has been turned upside down. Not only are second and third children allowed, but the state is finding every means to push people to have them. Next, will those who have no children, or fewer than two or even three, be fined or dismissed as before? What is the political and economic logic behind this hundred-and-eighty-degree reversal of policy?

Translator’s notes

[1] The Stalin quotation: from Marxism and the National Question (1913), translated here from the Chinese.

[2] Lenin’s “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues” (1920): a speech to the Third Congress of the Russian Young Communist League. Lenin is describing the schools of the old bourgeois society.

[3] Zhang Guimei (张桂梅): founder of a free girls’ high school in rural Yunnan and a nationally honored model teacher, whose regimented methods aimed at exam success have also drawn controversy.

[4] “Historical nihilism” (历史虚无主义): an official term of condemnation for accounts of history, especially of the Party and the revolution, that are seen as negating them.

[5] Qin Hui (秦晖): a prominent liberal historian. The phrase adapts the May Fourth slogan “Fight for sovereignty abroad, remove the traitors at home” (外争主权，内除国贼).

[6] Tianxia (《天下》): a magazine founded by Liu Jiming around 2011. Dushu (《读书》, Reading) and Tianya (《天涯》, Frontiers) were the leading journals associated with the New Left.

[7] Tong Xiangling (童祥苓) and Xie Fang (谢芳): both died in December 2024. Tong played the scout hero Yang Zirong in the model Peking opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy; Xie played the heroine Lin Daojing in the 1959 film The Song of Youth.

[8] He Jingzhi (贺敬之): a poet and playwright, co-author of the opera The White-Haired Girl (1945). Tear Stains (《泪痕》) is a 1979 film.

[9] “The veteran cadres are democrats...”: a remark attributed to Mao in 1976 (see the note to Selected Random Thoughts (22)).

[10] The family planning slogan: one of the most notorious slogans used by local officials to enforce the one-child policy, meaning that no one should be stopped from killing themselves in protest.

Random Thoughts (20)

Liu Jiming · December 15, 2024 · Source: Human Realm website

What matters is not the history being told, but the age in which it is told.

1
[A question to think about] In mainstream Chinese discourse, “ultra-left” is a term of abuse that many people avoid like the plague. Anyone branded with it is shunned and suppressed by the mainstream for a long time, treated as an outsider, as if the label were a mental seal stamped on the mind.[1] In Western societies, however, “far left” is a neutral concept. Not only do far-left parties and groups exist, but far-left politicians have even been elected president. Writers, scholars, and artists regarded as far-left are commonplace, and some have won major international prizes such as the Nobel Prize in Literature: the French writer Annie Ernaux, the Italian playwright Dario Fo, the Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, and others. Why is there such a stark contrast?

2
Two popular CCTV drama series have recently portrayed the founding of the People’s Republic as a feast of power-sharing, at which democrats of every stripe “sit in a row and share the fruit.”[2] The Communist leaders are all deference and humility toward these bourgeois politicians, who have the word “democracy” forever on their lips, while the nobles of the Republic, and even of the Qing dynasty, are transformed overnight into honored guests and even senior officials of the new government. It is as if what was about to be founded were not a new China “led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.” The worker and peasant masses who followed the Communist Party, shedding their blood and risking their heads to win their emancipation, are nowhere to be found in these dramas. Even the occasional land-reform episode appears in the name of “correcting leftist excesses.” In them, the peasant-association cadres and activists are all idlers, ruffians, loafers, or “ultra-leftists,” outright villains, while the landlords, gentry, and capitalists are upright and noble to a man, and become the persecuted and humiliated. Narratives like this, like other recent works depicting the events of the same period, are a popular rendering of mainstream ideology. They prove once again the famous dictum of the Italian philosopher Croce: all history is contemporary history. What matters is not the history being told, but the age in which it is told.

3
As Chairman Mao incisively analyzed in “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,”[3] opportunism and duplicity are inborn in the petty bourgeoisie. Like hair on a hide, it must cling either to the proletariat or to the bourgeoisie.[4] When the proletarian revolution is at high tide, some of them support it eagerly, and some even become its backbone. Once the revolution has succeeded, many of them, by virtue of their advantages and their seniority, naturally take up positions of real weight in the new regime. But as soon as the revolution loses ground and ebbs, they transform overnight, like Song Qiankun in Black and White,[5] into the vanguard, even the driving force, of bidding farewell to revolution, turning revisionist, and taking the capitalist road. The whole history of the twentieth-century international communist movement, and of the Chinese revolution and reform, bears this out fully. Today the petty bourgeoisie has split into a petty-bourgeois right and a petty-bourgeois left. The former built its fortunes by negating the first thirty years and supporting Reform and Opening; once it grew powerful, it went on to negate Reform and Opening too, and now advocates constitutional democracy and wholesale Westernization. The latter negates neither the first thirty years nor Reform and Opening, or else negates part and affirms part according to its own interests. It is critical of the problems of both thirty-year periods, the so-called “ultra-left” and “ultra-right,” and keeps a certain on-and-off relationship with mainstream politics. It advocates reform, opposes every revolution from right or left, and is a staunch supporter of state-nationalism. As the situation develops, they will show new forms and undergo new changes. But however they change, they can never escape the opportunism in their nature.

4
A netizen asked: Qiong Yao has died.[6] Why haven’t you written a single word of mourning, or even reposted anything? My answer: I have never read a single one of Qiong Yao’s works. For me, this person never existed, so there is no question of her passing. Why should I mourn or pay attention to someone who never existed?

5
One does not necessarily write for the present. One can also write for the future, or for the past: for a vanished history, or for a fallen class. Or, as the French writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, said in her Nobel lecture: “I write to avenge my people.”[7]

6
I have merely written down a true history and a true reality, yet certain people act as if facing a mortal enemy, and try to scrub the novel from the internet without leaving a trace. What exactly are they afraid of?

7
The disciples and grand-disciples of the Fu Zhigang who never betrayed[8] still sit on the rostrum. They are afraid of more people reading Black and White, so they use the power in their hands to wipe it out in a frenzy.

8
The human heart is the root of society, and the collapse of a society begins in people’s hearts, just as a tree rots from the roots. The process is slow. Apart from a very few, most people are not aware of it at all. They turn a blind eye to the crisis behind the bustle of the world, drift with the current, seize their pleasures while they can, and dream the long sweet dream of enjoying the shade beneath a great tree, until it comes crashing down and wakes them, too late. This is what the saying means: “In an avalanche, no snowflake is innocent.”[9]

9
Taking the capitalist road by socialist methods is one of the great inventions of the modern revisionists. America is not afraid of China doing capitalism America’s way. What it fears is China doing it with the socialist system of the Mao era, which “concentrates resources to accomplish great undertakings.”

A writer of WeChat public-account posts told me that if you write on WeChat that the Republic, or even the Qing dynasty, was good, nothing happens to you. But say one good word about the Mao era, and you get the full treatment: the post deleted, a temporary ban, then permanent closure of your account, each measure harsher than the last. This is what their “the two thirty-year periods must not negate each other” really means.[10]

10
In China, unless you have used at least two self-media accounts, you cannot fully experience the “freedom” of speech[11] the Chinese people enjoy.

11
In the Brezhnev years, the Soviet revisionist clique of traitors used the KGB and high technology to monitor every word and deed of the people in every corner, leaving no blind spot, and turned the world’s first socialist state, founded by Lenin, into a great prison without walls. They thought they had forged an indestructible body of diamond that would last forever. In the end they still could not escape their doom.

12
When I was in primary school, the classroom walls were hung with portraits of the revolutionary teachers Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao; of the proletarian writers Lu Xun and Gorky; and of people’s heroes such as Lei Feng, Wang Jinxi, and Wang Jie.[12] By the time my daughter was in primary school, the classroom walls were hung with portraits of bourgeois statesmen and scholars such as Napoleon, Washington, Cai Yuanpei, and Hu Shi. And now? I am told that some primary and secondary classrooms have begun hanging portraits of entrepreneurs and capitalist tycoons such as Ma Huateng (whether Jack Ma and Liu Chuanzhi are also among them remains to be confirmed).[13] The changing portraits on classroom walls trace how Chinese society has degenerated over the decades, step by step captured by bourgeois ideology. I cannot help sighing: when our grandchildren go to school, whose portraits will hang on the classroom walls then?

13
Compared with those of the twentieth century, the communists of the twenty-first century are fortunate to have the thought of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and the other revolutionary teachers, and the practical experience of the communist movement, to guide them. They are unfortunate in that the bourgeoisie that now holds the state machine, thanks to developed productive forces and advanced science, technology, and information, controls society and the individual with unprecedented severity, making the resistance of the proletariat many times more complicated and difficult than a hundred years ago. But a new era will inevitably give birth to new revolutionary theory and new forms of struggle. This is determined by the objective laws of social development, and does not depend on anyone’s will.

14
The revisionist clique fears and hates communists far more than the bourgeoisie does.

15
Nothing in the world is more absurd than this: to dig up a great road that was built with such difficulty, to coax and force people onto the wrong road, and then to point solemnly at the broken right road and swear, “We will never take the old road of isolation and rigidity!”[14]

Translator’s notes

[1] “Mental seal” (思想钢印): literally “thought steel stamp,” from Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Trilogy, in which a device implants an unshakable belief directly into the mind.

[2] “Sit in a row and share the fruit” (吃果果，排排座): from a Chinese nursery rhyme, used ironically for dividing up the spoils of power.

[3] “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” (1926): the opening essay of Mao’s Selected Works.

[4] “Like hair on a hide”: an echo of Mao’s 1957 image of intellectuals as hair that must attach to some “hide,” whether the old economic base or the new proletarian one: “If the skin is gone, what can the hair cling to?” (皮之不存，毛将焉附).

[5] Song Qiankun (宋乾坤): a character in Liu Jiming’s novel Black and White, a former revolutionary who abandons his ideals.

[6] Qiong Yao (琼瑶): the Taiwanese writer of hugely popular romance novels, who died in December 2024.

[7] “I write to avenge my people”: in her Nobel lecture, Ernaux recalled a line she wrote in her diary at twenty-two: “I will write to avenge my people” (J’écrirai pour venger ma race).

[8] Fu Zhigang (甫志高): the archetypal traitor in the revolutionary novel Red Crag (《红岩》, 1961), an underground Communist who betrays his comrades after his arrest. “The Fu Zhigang who never betrayed” refers to the novel Black and White, in which such a figure is never exposed and rises to power. See also the review “The Unbetrayed Fu Zhigang Is More Terrifying” on this site.

[9] “In an avalanche, no snowflake is innocent”: a saying popular on the Chinese internet, often attributed (probably wrongly) to Voltaire.

[10] “The two thirty-year periods must not negate each other”: see the note to Random Thoughts (24).

[11] “Freedom”: the original writes 柿油 (shìyóu, “persimmon oil”), a mocking homophone for 自由 (zìyóu, “freedom”) used online to ridicule the idea of free speech in China.

[12] Lei Feng, Wang Jinxi, and Wang Jie: model heroes of the Mao era: a selfless soldier, a pioneering oil worker (“Iron Man Wang”), and a soldier who threw himself on an explosive to save others.

[13] Cai Yuanpei and Hu Shi: liberal educators and scholars of the Republican era. Ma Huateng, Jack Ma, Liu Chuanzhi: the founders of Tencent, Alibaba, and Lenovo.

[14] “The old road of isolation and rigidity”: from Hu Jintao’s report to the Eighteenth Party Congress (2012); see the note to Random Thoughts (24).

Random Thoughts (19)

Liu Jiming · December 5, 2024 · Source: Human Realm website

They too would rather kill three thousand by mistake than let a single one escape.

1
A story once circulated widely online: had Lu Xun lived into the 1950s, he would have faced two choices, to shut up or go to prison.[1] This is, of course, a lie fabricated by the rightists. But let us follow that line of thought a little further: had Lu Xun lived into the new century, into today, say, what would his situation be?

2

In the clamor of the crowd
I would rather walk against the current,
my lonely figure
standing tall as a mast.
In the pitch-black night
I would rather be a martyr,
with a faint phosphor glow
to light the way for those who are lost.
When fawning on the rich becomes the fashion
I would rather be poor,
and on land not yet plundered by capital
defend with my sweat the dignity of a class.
When everyone chooses silence
I would rather be the child in Andersen’s tale,[2]
refusing the lie,
saying aloud all that I see.

3
China’s several thousand years of history are a history of man eating man, with the sole exception of half the history of New China. The first half of that sentence is Mr. Lu Xun’s;[3] the second half is mine.

4
Pang Donglai deserves praise.[4] But to hope that every enterprise can become a Pang Donglai, or even to see it as “Marxism returning to society,” is, like the kowtowing of some netizens after Zong Qinghou’s death last year,[5] a petty-bourgeois leftist fantasy, and runs counter to Marx’s theory of capital and surplus value.

5
In the 1960s and 70s, because of the upsurge of the communist movement, the capitalist countries of the West were forced to adopt a series of policies raising workers’ welfare and improving labor conditions, in order to ease class contradictions. That is how they came through the crisis of capitalism. Hence Guevara’s saying: it was not that the capitalists had a fit of mercy, but that we had “been here.”[6] Yet the bourgeoisie that has bred in the country the Teacher founded exploits and oppresses the proletariat more cruelly than the Western bourgeoisie does, as if he had never “been here” at all. This bears out the Teacher’s prophecy: when revisionism comes to power, capitalism comes to power, and the worst kind of capitalism at that.

6
If even Pang Donglai cannot be tolerated, you can see how greedy and how stupid China’s bourgeoisie and media have become. Going on like this, they will surely drive even a “capitalist with a conscience” like Yu Donglai into the “ultra-left”!

7
The restoration of capitalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union was not the failure of the socialism of Lenin and Stalin, but the collapse of the social-imperialism, that is, the revisionism, of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. The essence of social-imperialism is state-nationalism, and its inevitable result is fascism, as with Germany, Italy, and Japan in the twentieth century. In today’s terms, the mass base of state-nationalism is the so-called little pinks. It was such people who hastened the transformation of the Social Democratic Party into a fascist party; they were the real force that put Hitler on the Führer’s throne and launched the Second World War. Arendt’s “evil of the mediocre crowd”[7] is a philosophical generalization built on precisely this historical fact.

8
Opposing Marxism in the name of Marxism, and opposing socialism in the name of socialism, is one of the great inventions of certain mainstream intellectual elites in China today.

9
I happened across a screenshot of an article online, in which one sentence stood out as especially bold and tragic: “If the Cultural Revolution[8] begins, we have no choice but to fight to the death!” The man who said this has since died. Had he really died fighting those who were making a “Cultural Revolution,” he would at least have counted as a real man.

10
Since the 1980s, the rightist public intellectuals first negated the socialist revolution and construction of the first thirty years, then went on to negate the New Democratic Revolution led by the Communist Party, until they rejected its legitimacy to rule entirely, on both legal and moral grounds. This is the inevitable logic of raising a tiger that ends up turning on you.

11
“I have not betrayed the working class. ‘The socialism we were promised,’ ‘the early rich helping the rest get rich,’ I have done all of it...” These words of Yu Donglai’s, I’m afraid, are a slap in the face not only for “capital,” but for the “shop assistants”[9] too.

12
[A question to think about] Why do most rightists love to smear[10] the private lives of proletarian leaders, even stooping to rumor and slander, while comparatively few leftists like to do the same to the private lives of bourgeois leaders?

13
[A question to think about] Many successful entrepreneurs, once they have “run”[11] abroad, fail at everything they try. Even their swindles get them arrested. They are as useless as scrap, and can only live off their past gains. Some have even fallen into depression, decided that the capitalist West is a terrible place and that socialism with Chinese characteristics is better after all, grown more and more patriotic, and quietly come back. Why is this? The answers: (1) They are strangers in a strange land, speak no foreign language, and have no connections, so they cannot take a single step. (2) Abroad there is no business environment as relaxed as at home, and no attentive “shop assistants.” (3) Foreign laws are too strict and are enforced equally for all, with no “don’t arrest if you can avoid it, don’t convict if you can avoid it”;[12] and the trade unions do not speak for the companies, but stand up for the workers. (4) No overtime beyond eight hours is allowed, and employees cannot be fired or punished at will. There is no such thing as unpaid wages, and if a company is taken to court over it, the fines can bankrupt it. Which of these answers are right, and which are wrong?

14
[A question to think about] There is a view that, just as nuclear weapons are developed not to start wars but to keep the peace, so leftists should propagate and study Marxism-Leninism-Maoism not in order to launch a new proletarian revolution. Especially before class contradictions reach the boiling point and a new revolutionary subject and new conditions have formed, the realistic goal should be to force the bourgeoisie to lighten, or even give up, its exploitation and oppression of the ruled classes, to ease class contradictions, and to achieve socialism, and then communism, by way of social reform. Many regard this view as a rehash of the revisionism of Bernstein and Kautsky, but others consider it a major development of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism for the twenty-first century. Which view do you favor? Why?

15
A netizen recently asked: certain “Deerxist” youths and little pinks[13] say that you, like Mr. Yang Heping,[14] are a fundamentalist Marxist (an ultra-leftist), and that some young people, influenced by your ideas, have gone “into the factories to storm the tower,”[15] while you yourself “hide off to one side,” enjoying the privileges of a senior intellectual inside the system. Meanwhile some radical leftists accuse you of harboring illusions about Western-style capitalist reform, of being skeptical and passive toward the masses who demand revolution, and of “making eyes” at the save-the-Party faction,[16] and they spread rumors to attack you. What do you make of this? My answer: my ideas and views, and the social activities I take part in, can all be found in published statements, articles, and reports. As an intellectual who believes in communism, I regard this as my way of shouldering social responsibility. As for whether I am conservative or extreme, left or right, right or wrong, that is for the public to judge and for time to test. I have no right to pass judgment on myself, and no wish to offer any defense.

16
A certain newspaper planned to publish a review of Black and White, and I recommended “A Magic Mirror of a Century of History.” The editor replied: we don’t publish articles by ultra-left scholars; could you suggest another? I said, then find someone else to write one for you. And after that, nothing. In fact, Mr. Kong Qingdong’s review[17] is not “leftist” at all. It fully meets the standards of pure literature built up since the New Period, and in the eyes of some leftists it may even lean a little to the right. Even so, they too would rather kill three thousand by mistake than let a single one escape.[18]

Translator’s notes

[1] Lu Xun in the 1950s: the story derives from a 1957 conversation in which Mao was reportedly asked what Lu Xun would be doing were he alive, and replied that he would either be in prison, still writing, or would keep silent. The account appeared in memoirs published decades later, and its authenticity is disputed.

[2] The child in Andersen’s tale: the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who says aloud that the emperor has nothing on.

[3] “A history of man eating man”: from Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (1918), in which the narrator finds the words “eat people” written between the lines of the history books.

[4] Pang Donglai (胖东来): a supermarket chain in Henan, famous for paying its staff well above the norm and limiting their working hours. Its founder, Yu Donglai, came under attack online in 2024.

[5] Zong Qinghou (宗庆后): founder of the beverage giant Wahaha, who died in February 2024 and was widely mourned online as a “patriotic entrepreneur.”

[6] “We had been here”: a saying popular on the Chinese internet and attributed to Che Guevara, though there is no reliable source for it.

[7] “Evil of the mediocre crowd” (庸众之恶): Liu’s variation on Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” (平庸之恶), shifting its emphasis from the individual functionary to the masses.

[8] “Cultural Revolution”: the original uses 文G, an online euphemism for 文革, written that way to dodge censorship filters.

[9] “Shop assistants” (店小二): officials, who have been urged since the late 2010s to serve businesses with “shop-assistant-style service.”

[10] “Smear” (下蛆): literally “lay maggots,” slang for spreading malicious gossip.

[11] “Run” (润): internet slang for emigrating from China.

[12] “Don’t arrest if you can avoid it, don’t convict if you can avoid it”: a principle of judicial leniency toward private entrepreneurs promoted by Chinese courts and prosecutors from 2018 onward.

[13] “Deerxist” (鹿克思): a pun on 马克思 (Marx), swapping 马 (horse) for 鹿 (deer), after the idiom “calling a deer a horse.” It mocks people who profess Marxism while distorting it.

[14] Yang Heping (阳和平): Fred Engst, an American-born economist teaching in Beijing and a well-known Maoist, son of the American revolutionaries Joan Hinton and Erwin Engst.

[15] “Into the factories to storm the tower” (融工冲塔): rong gong, “merging with the workers,” refers to young leftists taking factory jobs to organize; for “storming the tower,” see the note to Random Thoughts (23).

[16] “Save-the-Party faction” (保救派): leftists who hope to rescue the Party from within rather than oppose it.

[17] Kong Qingdong (孔庆东): a professor at Peking University and a well-known leftist commentator. His review “A Magic Mirror of a Century of History” appears in English on this site.

[18] “Rather kill three thousand by mistake than let a single one escape” (宁可错杀三千，也不放过一个): a saying associated with the Nationalist government’s White Terror against the Communists after 1927.

Random Thoughts (18)

Liu Jiming · November 21, 2024 · Source: Human Realm website

1
If Confucius’s doctrine were really effective for governing the country, China would not have seen dynasties change so often in its history, nor so many peasant uprisings, and the Communist Party would not have had to lead workers and peasants to make revolution with their heads on the line. And if the twentieth-century communist movement had not suffered a full-scale capitalist restoration, humanity might truly have become the most advanced species and civilization in the universe.

2
Setting aside the quarrel between left and right and the distinction between socialism and capitalism, a normal and healthy society should be one in which upper and lower ranks, mainstream and margins, can talk to one another and interact constructively; in which every kind of demand can be transmitted freely and promptly turned into a basis for policy at the national level; and in which even extreme positions and views are respected and heard, and not threatened or suppressed on any pretext. Politics should not become the privilege of a few and a forbidden zone for the many. Otherwise, like a person suffering a cerebral thrombosis or septicemia, whose blood vessels no longer flow, whose organs face necrosis, and whose brain, starved of oxygen, may fail at any moment, it is not far from death.

3
A person can make mistakes, and so can a party, even going down the wrong road. As a Party member, faced with a party that has gone wrong, do you hold to the truth, remember your mission, and struggle resolutely against the error? Or do you submit to discipline and rules, drift with the tide, and help the tyrant in his cruelty? This tests not only your Party spirit but your character as a human being.

4
A person or a political party must not, for fear of committing “leftist” errors, rush headlong to the right for decades, refusing to turn back even after the boat has capsized. “Leftist” errors can ruin the Party’s cause, and so can rightist ones. Carried to the extreme, the latter are no longer errors of “excessive broadening,”[1] but betrayal, as with the likes of Khrushchev and Gorbachev.

5
For a person or a class, the step from reform to revolution is hard to take. It cannot be taken by wishing. It usually takes pressure from outside, being driven to the wall with nowhere left to turn, what people call being “driven up Mount Liang.”[2] So it was with the peasant revolutions of Chinese history, the bourgeois revolutions of nineteenth-century Europe, and the communist revolutions that swept the world in the twentieth century. Trump clearly does not qualify as such a revolutionary. At most he is a reformer produced by capitalism in crisis. Though what he does cannot fundamentally improve the condition of the proletariat, it is a resounding slap in the face for the greedy, tyrannical, hypocritical modern revisionists who betrayed their original aspiration and now devote themselves to serving as watchdogs of the global capitalist order. For China’s exploited and oppressed, it is not bearish news but bullish.[3]

6
The rightists have deceived several generations of young people with rumors. Now, when we speak a few true words, they turn around and accuse us of lying. While those of us who remember are still here, we must tell the truth to as many people as possible. Otherwise, once we are all gone, the rightists’ lies will become fact.

7
In the eyes of rumormongers, even the truth counts as a lie, just as a dog thinks people eat dung too.

8
When someone on the right falls, the left cheers. When someone on the left falls, the right cheers, and even kicks him while he is down. When the voices on both left and right have all gone silent, only one voice will remain. Is that really so good?

9
My home village is on the Jianghan Plain. As I remember it, in the 1960s and 70s every family slaughtered a pig for the New Year (as the saying went, “kill the New Year pig; if you raise two, sell one to the state”), and the meat lasted until the Qingming and Dragon Boat festivals. In the middle of the year the production team would also buy a few pigs and slaughter them so that every commune member could have a feast,[4] and on major holidays such as Mid-Autumn and National Day, every household received meat coupons to buy pork at a low price from the commune food station. The comment section mocked the blogger and the couple in the photo, and was filled with every kind of vicious, poisonous abuse. Some people spread the rumor that in those days peasants not only could not afford meat, but were not even allowed to slaughter and eat the pigs they raised, and had to sell them to the state. To hear them tell it, the first thirty years were worse even than the Republic or the Qing. Such brainless, stupid notions are common, online and off, the result of long indoctrination by the mainstream right and its Scar literature and art.

10
[A question to think about] “New Society,” “New Period,” and “New Era” refer to Chinese society after 1949, 1979, and 2012 respectively. Explain briefly what is “new” about each compared with the era before it.

11
Word online is that Sima Nan has been banned from posting. Fans on the right are cheering, fans on the left are stamping their feet, and public opinion seems to have been hit by an earthquake. I am not the least bit surprised. Kong Qingdong, Guo Songmin, myself, even Old Hu, jokingly called the government’s unofficial spokesman:[5] which of us has not enjoyed this treatment? And I am not entirely joking when I say that nowadays, if you have never been banned, you can hardly call yourself a big influencer.

12
“Cannon fire filled the sky, only to change the dynasty; corpses covered the plain, all of them sons of farmers.” This inscription, attributed to Mo Yan at the Liaoshen Campaign Memorial,[6] has been fiercely denounced by many little pinks and even leftists. But it raises a question worth pondering. If a revolution ends merely in a change of dynasty, with only a new set of rulers, the exploiters still exploiting and the exploited still exploited, everything back to how it was before the revolution, then for the exploited classes, does such a revolution still carry the self-evident sanctity and progressive meaning it once did?

13
Mainstream discourse and most works of literature and art no longer call the civil revolutionary war of 1946–1949 the “War of Liberation.” This follows the same logic as replacing “liberating Taiwan” with “cross-strait reunification.”

14
The “Yan Weicais”[7] went abroad to take refuge. Otherwise they could only have grown old in depression, wearing the labels of the “three kinds of people” and “remnants.” Not to question the reasons behind this, and merely to condemn their forced choice to leave the country, is neither moral nor decent. Only brainless little pinks would do it.

15
Giving monthly payments to those unable to work and to the unemployed: they say this is how it is done in the capitalist West, and that the government even covers the cost of baby formula. In the Mao era our country did much the same, except that there was no such thing as unemployment, and, with goods so scarce, there was no baby formula to provide.

16
If a person stays in the dark too long, will he come to think the whole world is black?

Translator’s notes

[1] “Excessive broadening” (扩大化): the official euphemism for political campaigns that went too far, as in “the broadening of the Anti-Rightist Campaign” (反右扩大化).

[2] “Driven up Mount Liang” (逼上梁山): from Water Margin, in which honest men are forced by injustice to join the outlaws on Mount Liang. It means being driven to rebellion.

[3] “Bearish... bullish” (利空、利好): stock-market terms, used here ironically.

[4] “Have a feast” (打牙祭): a colloquial phrase for an occasional meal with meat.

[5] Kong Qingdong, Guo Songmin, Hu Xijin: Kong is a Peking University professor and leftist commentator; Guo Songmin is a leftist military commentator; “Old Hu” is Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the Global Times.

[6] The Mo Yan inscription: an inscription attributed to Mo Yan at the memorial to the Liaoshen Campaign (1948), a decisive battle of the civil war, which provoked a nationalist outcry online in 2024. Its authenticity has been questioned.

[7] “Yan Weicais” (严伟才们): Yan Weicai is the hero of the model Peking opera Raid on the White Tiger Regiment. Song Yuqing, the actor who played him, later moved to the United States. The “three kinds of people” (三种人) were the categories purged after the Cultural Revolution: those who rose by following the rebel factions, those with serious factionalist thinking, and those who took part in beating, smashing, and looting. “Remnants” (余孽) refers to the “remnants of the Gang of Four.”

Random Thoughts (16)

Liu Jiming · October 21, 2024 · Source: Human Realm website

1
Why is it always the people who hop back and forth between left and right who thrive, while genuine leftists and genuine rightists so often find themselves isolated and without support?

2
A young person asked me: in some old films people often talk about “the iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” It sounds terrifying. Was it really so formidable? My answer: whether it is terrifying or formidable depends on whom it is aimed at. For today’s proletariat, the iron fist of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie may be every bit as fearsome, or more so.

3
There is something I have kept to myself for a long time. It may offend many people, but I have to say it. Among the Maoists, many are firm believers in communism who see reality clearly and know how to struggle and dare to. But many others are driven only by their worship of the Teacher, and still think they are living in the Mao era. They “mistake Bianzhou for Hangzhou,”[1] with neither a clear understanding of a social reality in which feudalism, capitalism, and revisionism[2] have come roaring back to life, nor any class consciousness. They keep their eyes fixed on those at the top, and believe whoever says a few nice words about the Teacher. Apart from longing for the Teacher to return to earth, they have lost all ability to face and think about real problems. Like a crowd of giant babies who have never been weaned, they would rather soak themselves in online slanging matches than do one useful, practical thing for the liberation of the proletariat, let alone struggle in any real sense. Then there is another kind: masked, they cry out for revolution online every day, seem braver than anyone, and are forever checking who is not revolutionary enough. Yet the moment they are banned, or “invited to tea”[3] even once, they are frightened off and do not dare breathe a word. Such armchair revolutionaries are not much different from the onlookers Lu Xun wrote about a hundred years ago. Should they ever meet a real revolution, they would only turn out to be another Ah Q, another Hua Laoshuan, or even another Fu Zhigang.[4]

4
History is made by the people. That is true. But at crucial junctures, what decides or changes the course of society is often...

5
The philosophy of the Communists is the philosophy of struggle.[5] As a writer, writing is my chief means of struggle. But if reality requires it, I do not rule out more direct means of struggle, as I have known before.

6
So-called “veiled expression,” also known as “metaphor,” is a rhetorical and writing technique routinely taught in university and secondary-school Chinese classes.[6] So shutting down websites is not enough. They will also have to shut down every Chinese class in every university and secondary school, and ban all literature too from “abusing” this technique.

7
First there was the retreat from the socialist revolution to the “correct line” of the Eighth Party Congress represented by Hu Fu and Xixian;[7] then the retreat to the New Democratic Revolution before 1949. To judge by the way things are going now, the next step is most likely a retreat to the Old Democratic Revolution led by Sun Yat-sen. And where will they retreat after that?

8
Born in the 1960s, I felt firsthand as a boy the great changes that the storm of the Cultural Revolution brought to society and to people’s minds. In particular, the campaigns of its later years, “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius” and “Appraise the Legalists, Criticize the Confucians,”[8] gave me an early immunity to the Way of Confucius and Mencius. As a young man, in the 1980s, I lived through the equally stormy so-called “emancipation of the mind” movement, and witnessed the whole arc of Western-style democracy from its rise to its disillusionment. These experiences have allowed me to keep a clear head in the face of the tide of nationalism and the resurgence of feudal dregs that began early in this century, and have left me with an instinctive wariness of bourgeois elite democracy. As I see it, China’s way out is neither a nationalism in Confucian robes nor a capitalism under the banner of democracy and freedom, but the socialist people’s democracy that Chairman Mao pointed to long ago in the caves of Yan’an, in which “everyone rises up to supervise the government.”[9] “Everyone rises up to supervise the government” is no empty phrase. It means building, on the basis of public ownership, effective forms through which the people appoint and dismiss officials and take a direct part in running the state, much like the three principles of the Paris Commune.[10] Such a people’s democracy was once put into practice in China, but it failed. It failed for many reasons, and none of them justifies negating and stigmatizing it wholesale, still less using that failure as an excuse to return to thousands of years of feudal institutions and culture. Everything depends on how we sum up the experience of those who came before us and carry on their legacy. As Communists, the legacy we should inherit first of all is Mao Zedong’s, not that of Sun Yat-sen or Confucius.

9
A netizen asked: why did you name the collection of your Weibo posts Random Thoughts? My answer: Random Thoughts is a collection of essays Mr. Ba Jin published in the 1980s, famous for denouncing the Cultural Revolution and calling for “telling the truth.” For it, Ba Jin was hailed as “the conscience of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century.” Today we especially need to learn from Mr. Ba Jin’s spirit of “telling the truth.” But the truth I mean is different from the truth Mr. Ba Jin meant. Mine is told from the standpoint of the working people; his was told from the standpoint of the intellectual elite. Truths told from different standpoints differ in essence.

10
Standpoint decides everything; it has nothing to do with whether one is a good or bad person. There are good people on the right, and bad people on the left. Good and bad have a class character. To admit this is to be a materialist; to deny it is to be an idealist.

11
I see many people indignant that the writer Mo Yan was invited to the National Day reception, and I am rather lost for words. Scar literature has gone on for more than forty years, and the political line at the top has always been perfectly clear. It did not begin with Mr. Mo’s rise in favor. On the contrary, many so-called leftists have heads full of paste. They measure the latter thirty years against the ideological standards of the first thirty, cling forever to illusions about the court, and squabble over “face projects” (such as whether a leader’s speech or some article mentioned the Teacher). Apart from shouting a few empty slogans, they are at a complete loss as to how to change, through struggle, a reality that has already been changed. If this goes on, the left will only grow weaker, unable to stand up to the right, and powerless to take part in whatever social reconstruction may come.

12
Carrying the lantern of socialism down the capitalist road was designed long ago by the Chief Architect.[11] For more than forty years, everything has followed this road map, “one crop after another,”[12] from the Three Represents and the Scientific Outlook on Development to Chinese-style modernization, all in one unbroken line. Certain “leftists” who dream of returning to the “old road” of socialism by way of reform are indulging in pure wishful thinking. Like Hu Xijin, Professor Ma Yongjun, with his recent call to “ride the horse of capitalism,” is merely saying it out loud. The die is cast and cannot be reversed, so they feel there is no longer any need to hide it.

13
Sina has adopted a new technology that blocks a user’s Weibo post or comment without notifying him. You can still see it yourself, but others cannot. Unless a netizen tells you, you assume it has been published. This is a thoroughly despicable deception, and violates the most basic principle of good faith a business owes its customers.

Translator’s notes

[1] “Mistake Bianzhou for Hangzhou” (错把汴州当杭州): a reversal of the Southern Song poet Lin Sheng’s line “taking Hangzhou for Bianzhou” (直把杭州作汴州), which mocked the court for idling in its new capital, Hangzhou, as if it were the lost capital, Bianzhou (Kaifeng). It means mistaking the present situation for the past.

[2] “Feudalism, capitalism, and revisionism” (封资修): a Cultural Revolution term for everything to be swept away.

[3] “Invited to tea” (喝茶): a euphemism for being summoned for questioning by the police or state security.

[4] Ah Q, Hua Laoshuan, Fu Zhigang: Ah Q, the self-deceiving hero of Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q,” who joins the 1911 Revolution without understanding it; Hua Laoshuan, the father in Lu Xun’s “Medicine,” who buys a bun soaked in an executed revolutionary’s blood to cure his son; Fu Zhigang, the traitor in the novel Red Crag.

[5] “The philosophy of the Communists is the philosophy of struggle”: a saying of Mao’s.

[6] “Veiled expression” (隐晦表达): Chinese internet regulators have targeted “veiled expression,” that is, criticism disguised as metaphor, allusion, or homophone, as a category of harmful content.

[7] Hu Fu and Xixian (胡服、希贤): Hu Fu was an underground alias of Liu Shaoqi; Xixian was the original given name of Deng Xiaoping. The Eighth Party Congress (1956) declared that the main contradiction in China was no longer class struggle but economic backwardness.

[8] “Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius” and “Appraise the Legalists, Criticize the Confucians”: political campaigns of 1973–1975 that attacked Confucianism and praised the Legalist school.

[9] “Everyone rises up to supervise the government”: Mao’s answer in the 1945 “Cave Dialogue” with Huang Yanpei (see the note to Random Thoughts (34)).

[10] The three principles of the Paris Commune: as usually summarized in China, the election of officials by universal suffrage, the right of voters to recall them at any time, and pay for officials no higher than a worker’s wage.

[11] “The Chief Architect” (总设计师): Deng Xiaoping, “chief architect of Reform and Opening.” “Carrying the lantern of socialism down the capitalist road” (打社灯走资路): a play on the familiar phrase “wave the red flag to oppose the red flag.”

[12] “One crop after another” (一茬接一茬): a phrase of Xi Jinping’s for carrying on the work of predecessors. The Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and Chinese-style modernization are the signature doctrines of Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping respectively.

Random Thoughts (13)

Liu Jiming · August 30, 2024 · Source: Utopia

Many people always say: we ordinary folk just want to live a good life; the rest is beyond us, and we don’t want to bother with it. What they don’t realize is that in a class society, if the proletariat lives well, the bourgeoisie won’t; and if the bourgeoisie wants to live above everyone else, the proletariat can never have the good life it wants.

1
To insist on upholding the Four Cardinal Principles while also saying “don’t ask whether it is capitalist or socialist”:[1] can no one see so obvious a contradiction?

2
[A question to think about] Some argue that the Teacher did make serious mistakes in his later years, three in particular. First, he handled antagonistic contradictions, such as those with the capitalist roaders, as non-antagonistic contradictions among the people, “learning from past mistakes to avoid future ones, and curing the illness to save the patient,”[2] contrary to the principles he himself set out in “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.” Second, during the Cultural Revolution he did not put the principles of the Paris Commune into effect. Although the “Four Great Freedoms”[3] were written into the 1975 Constitution, no real system was built for supervising, appointing, dismissing, and replacing those in power that could guarantee the dictatorship of the proletariat and the people’s mastery of the country, so that when the man died, his policies died with him. Third, he was too merciful. He was as warm as spring toward the people, but not “as cruel and ruthless as winter”[4] toward the enemy, and kept “giving them a way out” (which is related to the first point). Do you think this view is right? Why?

3
Patriotic education already starts in infancy. Is that still not enough? Any more and it will have to begin in the womb. Was the patriotism of the people in the first thirty years something taught in school? To talk of patriotism while ignoring the vast class divide is nothing but a fool’s dream.

4
People often say that Chinese culture is broad and profound, and this shows in its characters and its names. Names are not chosen at random, especially when they use characters with several sounds and meanings, which often carry rich hidden meanings. For example: Ze-dong; Xiao-ping, “laugh at the poor”; Hu Yao-bang, “the rich want help.”[5]

5
[Fill in the blank and make a sentence] Yesterday the party of the poor, today the rich family’s ( )

6
The national left and its fans have always seen state-owned enterprises as the symbol of the dominant position of public ownership. If that symbol ceases to exist, the only essential feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics left will be the leadership of the Party.

7
[A question to think about] Why can the bourgeoisie restore capitalism with ease, through a coup or peaceful evolution, while the proletariat cannot, and can seize power and build socialism only through revolution and enormous sacrifice?

8
[A question to think about] A lie repeated for a year or two will not become the truth. But what about ten years, forty, fifty, or even a hundred?

9
Chairman Mao said: where there is oppression, there is resistance. If we are talking about “rebels,” Chinese history is full of them. Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, Liu Bang and Xiang Yu, Huang Chao, Zhu Yuanzhang, Li Zicheng, Hong Xiuquan, down to Sun Yat-sen:[6] all were once branded rebels by the ruling class. When the Communist Party of China and the proletariat stepped onto the stage of history, these men were given a new name: revolutionaries, or leaders of peasant uprisings, forces that drove society forward. Not long ago, this verdict quietly began to change.

10
They have blocked every channel through which ordinary people can supervise and criticize them, and then shut the door to carry out “self-revolution.”[7]

11
“Some people who claim to believe in communism have led people onto the road of savage capitalism. And so faith has had dirty water thrown on it and lost its dignity. Whatever one believes in, in the end it is all about believing in money; any faith that helps you rise in office and get rich is a good faith.” (From a young person’s article, “My Road to Faith”)

12
Many people always say: we ordinary folk just want to live a good life; the rest is beyond us, and we don’t want to bother with it. What they don’t realize is that in a class society, if the proletariat lives well, the bourgeoisie won’t; and if the bourgeoisie wants to live above everyone else, the proletariat can never have the good life it wants.

13
The “fifty-centers”[8] open their mouths and brand someone a member of the “country-haters’ party.” By their logic, Marx, Engels, and Lenin would all have to be counted among the country-haters too.

Translator’s notes

[1] The Four Cardinal Principles and “don’t ask whether it is capitalist or socialist”: the Four Cardinal Principles (1979) are upholding the socialist road, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. “Don’t ask whether it is surnamed ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’” (不问姓资姓社) sums up the spirit of Deng’s 1992 Southern Tour.

[2] “Learning from past mistakes... curing the illness to save the patient” (惩前毖后，治病救人): Mao’s formula for handling errors among comrades, from the Yan’an Rectification Movement.

[3] The “Four Great Freedoms” (四大自由): the right to “speak out freely, air views fully, hold great debates, and write big-character posters,” written into the 1975 Constitution and removed in 1980.

[4] “As warm as spring... as cruel and ruthless as winter”: from Lei Feng’s famous diary: “Treat comrades with the warmth of spring... treat the enemy as cruelly and ruthlessly as harsh winter.”

[5] The name puns: Mao Zedong’s name means “to benefit the East.” Deng Xiaoping’s 小平 is read as the near-homophone 笑贫, “laugh at the poor,” echoing the saying “they laugh at the poor, not at the whore.” Hu Yaobang’s name is read as 胡富要帮, roughly “the rich want help.”

[6] The rebels: Chen Sheng and Wu Guang led the first peasant uprising against the Qin (209 BCE); Liu Bang and Xiang Yu overthrew the Qin, and Liu founded the Han; Huang Chao led a great rebellion in the late Tang; Zhu Yuanzhang rose from a peasant rebel to found the Ming; Li Zicheng’s rebel army toppled the Ming; Hong Xiuquan led the Taiping Rebellion.

[7] “Self-revolution” (自我革命): an official slogan for the Party’s internal discipline and anti-corruption drives.

[8] “Fifty-centers” (五毛): online slang for paid pro-government commentators, said to earn fifty cents per post. “Country-haters’ party” (恨国党): a nationalist insult for critics of China.

Random Thoughts (12)

Liu Jiming · August 23, 2024

Reading these two lines again now, I find them strikingly apt, as if they had been written not more than forty years ago, but today.

1
Today is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Deng Xiaoping, “son of the Chinese people”[1] and “chief architect of Reform and Opening.” The best way to commemorate him is to remember what he said and did, and to test his practice by his own theory.

2
[A question to think about] “Chang Kai-shen”[2] lost the whole mainland, yet the “Fruit Party”[3] has never accused him of any mistake. The Teacher led the workers and peasants, through blood and sacrifice, to win a red country, and left his successors a thriving New China. Yet he is accused of isolation and rigidity and of bringing the economy to the brink of collapse. Even when foreign heads of state pay their respects at his Memorial Hall, the official media will not report it, as if the man lying there were not the founding leader (the Fruit Party calls its own the “Father of the Nation”) but someone with nothing to do with this country at all. Why? Answer one: he made serious mistakes in his later years. Two: to avoid a personality cult. Three:...

3
The poems and essays of “Chang Kai-shen” can be published openly on the mainland, while those of Wang, Zhang, Jiang, and Yao[4] are banned the moment they appear. Clearly the men at court hate them far more than they hate the Generalissimo.

4
Treating everything as the work of “hostile foreign forces” is a disease, and it needs treatment.

5
To proclaim that the “red gene” must be carried on, while again and again suppressing grassroots red cultural activities, is a classic case of Lord Ye loving dragons.[5]

6
Without the guidance of advanced thought and the leadership of a vanguard, the people are only a rabble.

7
[A question to think about] Taking the story of Huang Shuai[6] as an example, compare the first thirty years with the latter thirty: which of them is really practicing “slavish education”?

8
Many of Mr. Guo Songmin’s recent film reviews criticize films and television dramas that negate the New Democratic Revolution. The one he criticizes this time, Decoded,[7] is a film that negates “the first thirty years.” There are many such films and dramas. Like Scar literature, they form a mainstream narrative pattern, and all use this sly, under-the-table technique. Ordinary audiences find it hard to recognize, and are brainwashed without noticing.

9
In the eyes of the mainstream, old He (Jingzhi) counts as “ultra-left.” It is a wonder he was not punished the way old Wei was. How could he possibly...

10
Many countries today, such as India, Nepal, the Philippines, Peru, and France, have Maoist parties. A few years ago someone in China founded a similar party, and its organizers were quickly arrested and sentenced to several years in prison.

11
The May 1980 issue of China Youth published a letter signed “Pan Xiao,”[8] which traced the thinking of a “young woman factory worker” whose communist ideals had collapsed and who had become an individualist believing in “subjectively for oneself, objectively for others.” It set off a nationwide debate among young people on “Why is the road of life getting narrower and narrower?”, whose influence was second only to the great debate on “practice is the sole criterion of truth.” Pan Xiao was only twenty-three when she wrote that letter. Were she alive today, she would be sixty-seven. I wonder whether she worked smoothly at the factory until she retired, or whether, soon after, she was laid off in the wave of layoffs that swept the country, and ended up, like Ni Hongmei in Cao Zhenglu’s novella There,[9] as a “sentinel under the neon lights.” If she were asked to write another letter, what would she write?

12
A human life of a few decades passes in a flash. If you cannot say, or dare not say, what you want to say, it is like guarding a house full of money you will not spend or are not allowed to spend: you are no more than a walking corpse. How sad that is!

13
A theory that serves as a guiding ideology should at least be logically consistent, whether or not it stands the test of practice. I questioned its self-contradictions, and was reported, and the platform simply deleted my post. I am a little curious: what did they report? That I was wrong to question it, or that I should not question it at all?

14
One thing must be clear: the recent upheaval in Bangladesh[10] is not a proletarian revolution, but a progressive bourgeois democratic movement led by young students, with the proletariat taking part. It is not much different from the earlier Jasmine Revolution or Occupy Wall Street, except that the former succeeded (forcing the fall of the despotic, brutal, and corrupt Hasina regime), while the latter ended in failure.

15
[A question to think about] Some countries deal with “dissidents” by expelling them without silencing them; others silence them and restrict them from leaving the country. Which of these two punishments do you think shows less respect for human rights, or is less humane?

16
Some officials paint pictures of pie in the sky for ordinary people every day and keep coining new terms, while lies, empty words, and stock phrases fly everywhere. They make decisions on a whim, grab credit wherever it appears, and shift blame whenever something goes wrong. They think only they are right, listen only to flattery, and never to criticism. They turn a blind eye to the chronic ills of the system and the crises of society, treat the head when the head aches and the foot when the foot hurts, and busy themselves silencing people, deleting posts, and closing accounts to divert attention from the conflicts. They never solve problems at the root, and are forever scheming how to monitor and deal with the people who raise them.

17
In the proletarian era, the rightists, held down and seeing no way out, once asked in anguish: “I love my country, but does my country love me?” (See Bai Hua’s film Unrequited Love.)[11] In the bourgeois era, the exploited and oppressed should ask themselves the same question, instead of being led in circles by the statist and nationalist rhetoric of the exploiting classes until they forget their own real situation and class identity.

18
The famous poet Bei Dao’s lines “Baseness is the passport of the base, / nobility the epitaph of the noble,” and Gu Cheng’s “The black night gave me black eyes, / yet I use them to seek the light,”[12] were denunciations of the Cultural Revolution. They opened the way for Scar literature in poetry, swept the 1980s, and were known by heart to countless literary youths and university students. Reading these two lines again now, I find them strikingly apt, as if they had been written not more than forty years ago, but today.

Translator’s notes

[1] “Son of the Chinese people”: from Deng Xiaoping’s 1981 foreword to an English edition of his speeches: “I am a son of the Chinese people, and I deeply love my country and my people.”

[2] “Chang Kai-shen” (常凯申): a mocking name for Chiang Kai-shek, after a Tsinghua University professor’s 2008 translation of a Russian book that mistakenly rendered “Chiang Kai-shek” back into Chinese as “Chang Kai-shen.”

[3] “Fruit Party” (果党): a mocking homophone for 国党, the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party).

[4] Wang, Zhang, Jiang, and Yao: Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing, and Yao Wenyuan, the “Gang of Four.”

[5] “Lord Ye loving dragons” (叶公好龙): a fable about Lord Ye, who decorated his house with dragons, then fled in terror when a real dragon came to visit. It means professing to love something one actually fears.

[6] Huang Shuai (黄帅): a Beijing primary-school pupil whose 1973 letter criticizing her teacher’s authoritarian methods was published in the People’s Daily. She was made a national model of “going against the tide.”

[7] Decoded (《解密》, 2024): a film directed by Chen Sicheng, based on Mai Jia’s spy novel.

[8] “Pan Xiao” (潘晓): the letter was in fact a composite, written by the editors from the experiences of two young people, Pan Wei, a young woman factory worker, and Huang Xiaoju, a student, whose names were combined into the pen name.

[9] Cao Zhenglu’s There (《那儿》, 2004): a landmark novella of “bottom-layer literature” about the privatization of a state factory. Its character Ni Hongmei, a laid-off worker, is driven into prostitution. “Sentinels under the neon lights” ironically echoes the title of the 1960s play Sentinels Under the Neon Lights (《霓虹灯下的哨兵》), about PLA soldiers resisting the temptations of Shanghai.

[10] Bangladesh: in August 2024, a student-led uprising forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to resign and flee the country.

[11] Bai Hua’s Unrequited Love (《苦恋》): a 1979 screenplay by Bai Hua, filmed as Sun and Man, about an artist persecuted after returning to China. Its line “You love your country, but does your country love you?” led to its banning and to a national campaign of criticism in 1981.

[12] Bei Dao and Gu Cheng: the opening lines of Bei Dao’s “The Answer” (1976) and the whole of Gu Cheng’s two-line poem “A Generation” (1979), both defining poems of Misty Poetry.

Random Thoughts (11)

Liu Jiming · August 6, 2024 · Source: Utopia

In the minds of the capitalist roaders, Mao was merely the “big brother” who led them in “conquering the realm.” Once they had cut away the side of him that was a leader and teacher of the proletarian revolution, and remade him as a harmless nationalist idol, they could “sit on the throne of the realm” with an easy conscience.

1
When the public’s complaints go nowhere, when there is no channel for oversight, when the government has lost all credibility and every path to reform is blocked, and society sinks into a general crisis, revolution may break out at any moment.

2
What is legal, and what is illegal? Under bourgeois law, exploitation is legal; under proletarian law, exploitation is against the law. For the bourgeoisie and the elite-capitalist set, there is of course nothing wrong with capitalism. It is the best social system there is. That is the class character of law.

3
People often ask why real revolutions so seldom break out in America and the West. The answer lies in their political systems. In bourgeois democracies, every opposing political force is allowed and tolerated, free to form associations and parties and to stand in elections. It is precisely this “legality” that dissolves the revolutionary impulse of every dissenting group and individual, the proletariat included, so that they submit willingly to bourgeois rule. One could therefore say that modern Western democratic politics is a hotbed that corrodes proletarian revolution, while despotism is the midwife of revolution. Under despotism, the proletariat and every dissenting force are treated as “rebels” and cruelly suppressed. Finding no channel or outlet for their demands, driven to the wall with nowhere to turn, they have no choice but the extreme form, revolution, and so become real “rebels.”

4
In the minds of the capitalist roaders, Mao was merely the “big brother” who led them in “conquering the realm.”[1] Once they had cut away the side of him that was a leader and teacher of the proletarian revolution, and remade him as a harmless nationalist idol, they could “sit on the throne of the realm” with an easy conscience.

5
If the online ID number and online ID certificate system[2] is put into effect, it will be no different from managing 1.1 billion netizens like prisoners.

6
The Measures for the Administration of Online ID Certificates were solemnly published for public comment, while at the same time people were blocked from posting their comments. Such a clumsy “democracy show” is truly astonishing.

7
Concern for the sufferings of the people and criticism of social injustice have always been the vocation of “the left.” When did they become the patent of “the right,” and “anti-intellectual” and “feeble-minded” to boot?

8
Hu Xijin’s ban this time may not be because he said anything wrong, but because he was too clever by half and said what should not have been said, and touched a taboo.[3] Of course, as a beneficiary and staunch supporter of Reform and Opening, old Hu will not be ordered to die like Yang Xiu.[4] At most he will spend some time in the dark room, and when he comes out, he can go back to serving his lord.

9
[Questions to think about] One: is “public ownership as the mainstay,” as written in the Constitution and the Party Charter, the same as “public ownership as the mainstay” in reality? Two: are state-owned enterprises the same as public ownership and socialism?

10
In this age of capitalist globalization, the Olympic Games are nothing but a lavish showcase in which the bourgeoisie of every country instills patriotism and the myth of individual striving in the proletariat.

11
Truth becomes clearer the more it is debated. If the national left believes it holds the truth, it should debate the national right on equal terms. Neither side should rely on power to gag the other.

12
Even though I may be banned, or face harsher repression, I must still say this: gagging criticism and dissenting opinions will not eliminate opposing voices. On the contrary, it will “force out” more and more dissenters, the very opposite of what the stability-maintainers want. Even the ancients knew that floods should be channeled, not dammed. Why can’t certain departments of power understand this?

13
In my youth, I often took part in parades or watched others march, and saw them as a normal part of the nation’s political life and a sign that the people were masters of the country. Later, parades gradually disappeared from real life, and even from print. People born after the 1990s probably don’t know what a parade is, or think it is a special right that only foreigners enjoy.

14
The recent string of exposed “two-faced people,” from the Party secretary of Wannian County in Jiangxi, Mao so-and-so, to the Renmin University professor Wang so-and-so who sexually assaulted a student, a certain bureau chief in Suzhou, and the Olympic official Han so-and-so, all have one thing in common: they used the power in their hands to extract sex and profit, and took revenge on subordinates and students. Two-faced people share another trait too. In ordinary times they are more politically correct than anyone, and shout the loudest for reform, crying that it must be carried through at any cost, cutting a bloody path forward. But they make only others pay the cost, while they themselves swing the sickle and quietly reap the harvest. As ordinary people say: before they fall, they all look like Jiao Yulu; after they fall, they all turn out to be Xu Caihou.[5] Two-faced people have existed in every dynasty, and most of all in their final years, such as the late Ming and the late Qing. As the main body of traitors, they became almost the biggest force in bringing down the Ming and Qing. The scourge of two-faced people is a fate no dynasty can escape, and a classic symptom of a political ecology in collapse.

15
A society that breeds two-faced people one after another must be a society where lies prevail, and where telling the truth takes immense courage and conscience. But “telling the truth” also needs to be analyzed. In the early 1980s, for example, Mr. Ba Jin strongly advocated telling the truth, and his Random Thoughts became a model of truth-telling. What he meant by “telling the truth” was that people during the Cultural Revolution, and indeed throughout the first thirty years, were all telling lies. This does not accord with the facts. That some intellectuals, under the sway of their petty-bourgeois standpoint and rejecting proletarian thought reform in their bones, told lies to go with the tide is true; such intellectuals may be called the “two-faced people” of that era. But to claim that most workers and peasants were also telling lies is plainly a slander with ulterior motives. Everyone who lived through that era knows that the broad masses of workers and peasants sincerely loved Chairman Mao and the Communist Party and supported socialism, not just in words but in deeds. That is also why so many people today feel nostalgia for that era. Some intellectuals, in order to blacken that era and seize the moral... their conduct over the past forty-odd years bears this out. This shows that “telling the truth” also has a class character.

Translator’s notes

[1] “Big brother” (带头大哥), “conquering the realm” (打江山), and “sitting on the throne” (坐江山): the language of sworn brotherhoods and dynastic founders. The first phrase evokes the leader of a band of outlaws, as in the martial-arts novels of Jin Yong.

[2] The online ID system (网号、网证): in July 2024, Chinese authorities released draft measures for a national “cyberspace ID” to verify internet users’ real identities, and opened them for public comment.

[3] Hu Xijin’s ban: in summer 2024, the former Global Times editor’s social-media accounts were suspended, reportedly after his comments on the Third Plenum.

[4] Yang Xiu (杨修): an adviser to the warlord Cao Cao, put to death for being too clever in reading his master’s mind. The original writes 赐si to evade censorship filters.

[5] Jiao Yulu and Xu Caihou: Jiao Yulu (1922–1964) was a county Party secretary held up as the model of a selfless official; General Xu Caihou (1943–2015), a former vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, was expelled from the Party for massive corruption.

Random Thoughts (10)

Liu Jiming · July 28, 2024 · Source: Utopia

The crux of “calling a deer a horse” is that, given enough time, people will take the deer for a horse and forget what a real horse looks like.

1
The crux of “calling a deer a horse”[1] is that, given enough time, people will take the deer for a horse and forget what a real horse looks like.

2
When I read a biography of Nietzsche at university, I came to the scene in which Nietzsche, seeing a skeletal old horse lashed bloody by its owner’s whip in the street, ran up, threw his arms around the horse’s neck, and wept.[2] I did not quite understand what he did, and even thought it a little foolish. But now, whenever I see the faces of working people, one after another, struggling to feed their families, facing every kind of threat to their survival and every kind of oppression, faces so full of misery they are nearly numb, I too can hardly keep from weeping.

3
In some people’s eyes, I am probably either a madman or a fool! In fact, I once dreamed that two men in uniform burst into my home to take me away. I asked where they were taking me. They said something I didn’t catch, but from their tone it was either a madhouse or a prison.

4
Tearing down (Mao) statues and protecting them is becoming the new normal of class struggle in the new era.

5
This monster born of the union between the system and capital threatens and violates not only the proletariat, but the rights of every citizen. And it will bring disaster on all humanity.

6
Many overseas media and scholars, ordinarily virulently anti-China and anti-Communist, are in complete agreement with those at home on one thing alone: rejecting and hating the Cultural Revolution. They have become comrades in the same trench. Whenever someone overseas calls for vigilance against “a restoration of Cultural Revolution ultra-leftism,” those at home begin using public power to purge people “involved with the left,” showing a remarkable unspoken understanding. That is exactly what they did to the journal series I edited, Midstream.

7
Red is the color of the Communist Party of China and of the Chinese revolution. It stands for the blood and lives of millions of martyrs. The color of blood is crimson, not pink. The essence of red is revolution, and the soul of revolution is struggle. China’s New Democratic Revolution and its socialist revolution and construction all succeeded through arduous, indomitable struggle. The revival of socialism in the twenty-first century needs the same fighting spirit. I hope the Human Realm website will stay true to its original aspiration and carry through to the end the unfinished cause of the revolutionary martyrs.

8
The New Left were once critics of developmentalism. Now they have become its champions.

9
The most brilliant move of Vietnamese-style socialism is not to take the capitalist road by capitalist methods (as in Eastern Europe and Russia), but to take the capitalist road by socialist methods. It abolishes parades, demonstrations, and strikes, and goes in for theoretical innovation on a grand scale, justifying capital in the name of developing Marxism. In this way it can hoodwink those who support socialism into resigning themselves to being leeks for the harvest, without fear that hostile foreign forces will play the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist card or the democracy card and incite troublemakers to rebel.[3] This ensures that the Vietnamese Communist Party’s hold on power is never challenged, so that, with the economy at the center and resources concentrated on great undertakings, it can achieve the great rejuvenation of the Annamese nation.[4]

10
Had Ho Chi Minh launched a Cultural Revolution in Vietnam, he too might have been given a seventy-thirty verdict.[5]

11
The “counterattack and settling of accounts”[6] against the period of socialist revolution and construction was completed long ago. The one against the New Democratic Revolution is nearly done as well.

12
If the achievements of socialist revolution and construction have not been preserved, then even if the achievements of New Democracy are preserved, what would they mean?

13
If one man’s nonsense and pack of lies can pass for theory, whose tragedy is that?

14
Using Li Kui to protect Li Gui[7] is one of the great inventions of certain “leftists.”

15
Did the Teacher make “mistakes in his later years”? Of course he did, and quite serious ones: he misjudged the people he put in charge. That alone was enough to ruin a thriving cause of revolution and construction, and it was no less serious a mistake than “Chang Kai-shen’s.”[8] When the Fruit Party lost the mainland, it at least still had an island to hold, from which to plot a comeback. And in the end it got its wish, and sent its “Father of the Nation” back to the mainland. As for the Teacher, after his death he was smeared... they must be secretly laughing!

Translator’s notes

[1] “Calling a deer a horse” (指鹿为马): the Qin-dynasty eunuch Zhao Gao presented a deer at court and called it a horse, to see who dared contradict him. It means deliberately twisting the truth.

[2] Nietzsche and the horse: according to a well-known anecdote, Nietzsche collapsed in Turin in January 1889 after embracing a horse that was being flogged, shortly before his final mental breakdown.

[3] “Rebel”: the original writes 造饭 (“cook rice”) for 造反 (“rebel”), a homophone used to slip past censors.

[4] Vietnam: the whole passage is a thinly veiled allegory of China. “Annam,” the old Chinese name for Vietnam, stands in for China, and “the great rejuvenation of the Annamese nation” echoes the official slogan “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

[5] “Seventy-thirty verdict” (三七开): “70 percent achievements, 30 percent mistakes,” the formula the Party adopted for Mao in 1981.

[6] “Counterattack and settling of accounts” (反攻倒算): originally the Communist term for landlords taking back land and property, and taking revenge, after land reform.

[7] Li Kui and Li Gui: in Water Margin, the bandit Li Gui impersonates the hero Li Kui. The pairing means the genuine article versus the impostor.

[8] “Chang Kai-shen” and the “Fruit Party”: mocking names for Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (see the notes to Random Thoughts (12)). “Father of the Nation”: Sun Yat-sen, whom the Kuomintang reveres as Guofu, and who is now honored ever more lavishly on the mainland.

Random Thoughts (9)

Liu Jiming · July 9, 2024 · Source: Cao Zhenglu–Liu Jiming Research Center | Weibo

For a proletarian party to overthrow feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism and establish a socialist state, it often takes decades of arduous struggle and the sacrifice of tens of millions of lives. But to restore feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism may take only a few years, a few months, even a few days, without firing a shot or committing a single soldier.

1
Only when the interests of the nation coincide with those of the proletariat does nationalism have progressive meaning. Otherwise, as Lenin said, it becomes a “tattered flag” with which the bourgeoisie fools the proletariat.

2
For a proletarian party to overthrow feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism and establish a socialist state, it often takes decades of arduous struggle and the sacrifice of tens of millions of lives. But to restore feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism may take only a few years, a few months, even a few days, without firing a shot or committing a single soldier.

3
Today is “July First” again.[1] For many people, it is also his birthday. Let us remember him in silence.

4
The beauty of hanging out a sheep’s head while selling dog meat is that, after you have sold it long enough, the diners believe they really are eating mutton. Some can’t even be bothered to tell mutton from dog meat; it’s all meat once it’s in the belly. That is why shops selling fakes do a roaring trade, while shops selling the real thing see few customers and close one after another.

5
Yesterday was the anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. An article said that in his lifetime the Teacher was disciplined more than twenty times (including being removed from posts, demoted, and expelled from the Party), and that after his death he has been slandered all the more. Moved by this, I could not help feeling ashamed.

6
I am reposting a rightist article, full of the “Spring and Autumn” style of veiled censure,[2] full of hatred and sourness. Yet one passage reveals a certain honesty in this little public intellectual who styles himself “a civilized man,” and I can’t help giving him some credit: “Some ‘public intellectuals’ have had a very bad counter-effect. They oppose anything to do with Shaoshan (meaning the Teacher),[3] even anything Chinese, and say some very anti-intellectual, low-grade things. As a result, some people who don’t want to think deeply have begun, in reaction, to embrace the old man, swinging from one extreme to the other, and ending up defending the ‘Great Liberation.’” However, his calling “seeking the greatest interests of the greatest number of people” “radical” shows that he is just as anti-intellectual and reactionary as the other public intellectuals.

7
Zyuganov, a Communist Party leader, does not fight for the freedom and liberation of the proletariat, but pledges loyalty to the bourgeois state and accepts awards from the president.[4] This is not an honor but a disgrace.

8
The rightists have a famous saying: everyone makes mistakes; the Teacher was a man, not a god; so he must be pulled down from his pedestal. There is nothing wrong with the logic. What is wrong is that, while pulling the Teacher off his pedestal, they put someone else up on one. And what is even more wrong: since everyone makes mistakes, and the Party is made of people, the Party can make mistakes too. In that case, when Party members and the masses criticize the Party’s work, its policies, and its leaders, does that count as “improper discussion”?[5]

9
In today’s public discourse, nothing is safer, or draws more eyeballs, than discussing international politics rather than domestic affairs. So many people talk only about the world, and little or nothing about home. This is indeed a “clever” choice.

10
Where there is a Jesus, there will be a Judas; if not this one, then that one. So it is with God and Satan, Stalin and Khrushchev, light and darkness, loyalty and betrayal. History always develops along a winding path. But we must believe that the Day of Judgment will surely come.

11
Old Hu is very particular about his words. “Redraw” was a very precise choice. They really have “redrawn” the New China the Teacher founded back to what it was before. At the thought of it, old Hu and his kind must laugh out loud in their sleep.

To serve the interests of the few is to be humane; to serve the interests of the many is to be inhumane. That is the logic of the rightists.

12
Calling class struggle “factional struggle” is another favorite rhetorical trick of the rightists.

13
Public intellectuals come in two kinds, those outside the system and those inside it. The first are kept by the West, such as a certain He and a certain Mao,[6] and are called the New Right. The second are kept by the system, such as the scholar Gan Yang (a leading figure of the New Left), Zhang Weiwei (a leading figure of statism), and the media man Hu Xijin. They are a mixture, a hybrid, of liberalism and nationalism. Before the pandemic, the internet was largely the domain of public intellectuals outside the system. After the pandemic, the system, riding the momentum of nationalism, suppressed them until they were routed. But they have not truly left the stage. Instead, the public intellectuals outside and inside the system are showing a tendency to merge. Nowhere is this clearer than in Hu Xijin.

14
Mr. Hu and the forces of corruption are all dogs. As for who their master is, many people know; they just don’t say it. The flood of abuse against Hu online is not really aimed only at Hu. People simply dare not provoke his master, so they go after the underling instead. Who told him to guard his master’s house so zealously?

15
Don’t be so quick to speak for “the Chinese people.” The people divide into the proletariat on one side, and the bourgeoisie and its dependents on the other. Intellectuals stand either with the bourgeoisie or with the proletariat. To call Mr. Hu a dog is not an insult. Speak for the bourgeoisie, and you are the bourgeoisie’s dog; speak for the proletariat, and you are the proletariat’s dog. It must be one or the other.

16
A netizen asked me why I so seldom criticize the capitalist West. My answer: if criticizing the West could change the fate of China’s proletariat and broad masses of working people, or if the working masses in Western capitalist countries really lived in worse conditions than in our country, I would criticize them every day, and louder than all the patriotic big influencers in public discourse today.

17
...My answer: let’s use a person as an analogy. A sick person can put on a face that looks perfectly healthy, but the disease inside cannot fool anyone. If he pretends, or even denies, that he is ill and refuses treatment, the illness will only get worse until it is beyond cure. So the substance is surely more important than the face. A face can be true or false, and can be changed at will; the substance cannot. A person who lives for face deceives himself; a country that survives on face deceives others. Either way, the result harms both oneself and others. Some say that many leftists have won face but lost substance, while many rightists have lost face but won substance. Thinking it over, there is something to that.

Translator’s notes

[1] “July First” (七一): the anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, officially celebrated on July 1. “His birthday” is ambiguous in the original; it may refer to the Party itself, or to Mao, whose cause the Party embodied for many.

[2] “Spring and Autumn” style (春秋笔法): after the Spring and Autumn Annals, traditionally said to have been edited by Confucius, in which praise and blame are conveyed through subtle choices of wording. It means veiled, insinuating criticism.

[3] Shaoshan (韶山): Mao’s birthplace in Hunan, here a stand-in for Mao. The “Great Liberation” in the same quotation appears to be a coded reference to the Mao era.

[4] Gennady Zyuganov: the long-time leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, who has received state honors from Vladimir Putin.

[5] “Improper discussion” (妄议): from the Party’s disciplinary rules of 2015, which ban members from “improperly discussing the central leadership’s policies.”

[6] “A certain He and a certain Mao”: the original partly disguises the names (贺某方、茅某拭), and the translation keeps this. The two are prominent liberal intellectuals.

Random Thoughts (7)

Liu Jiming · June 8, 2024 · Source: Red Song Society website

Where in China today is there any ultra-left? There is only the ultra-right. The so-called “ultra-left” are merely cadres, ordinary people, and intellectuals who hope for a return to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and socialism as the Constitution defines them. When such people are regarded as the “ultra-left,” the nature of Chinese society goes without saying.

1
Are the “abundant fruits” of Reform and Opening simply this: that a few have become fabulously rich and pass their privileges down from generation to generation, while more and more young people are reduced to proletarians, even “negative-propertied,” who cannot afford a home, cannot start a family, cannot afford to have children?

2
[A question to think about] Throughout Chinese history, it seems, it has always been the lower orders who loved the country and the elites who sold it out. The Mao era alone was the exception. Why?

3
Black taken for white, the loyal confused with the treacherous. The Father of the Nation betrayed, the original aspiration defied. Down the wrong road, never to turn back till death. A century-old party, a laughingstock at last. Sorry, I’m talking about the Fruit Party.[1]

4
Sometimes I really can’t work out whether calling someone a patriot is praise or an insult.

5
[A question to think about] Are loving one’s country and patriotism the same concept? Does the latter represent a self-evident “political correctness”?

6
...including the recent, fiercely debated film Reinforcements Arrive Tomorrow,[2] is not simply a matter of “historical nihilism.” The deeper cause lies in the accelerating “Republicanization” of society as a whole.

7
The power of faith is boundless. Above all when it is bound up with the interests of the great majority of the people, it can overcome the selfishness and vanity inherent in human nature, conquer inner weakness and even the fear of death, and become fearless, bursting forth into a noble readiness to give everything, life included, for one’s faith.

8
“At midnight the cuckoo still weeps blood; it will not believe the east wind cannot be called back.”[3] I once prized this line, and the fervent love of country it carries, and often lost myself in a Qu Yuan-like self-pity. But after a certain resolution was published, I knew they would never “turn back,” and gradually the line stopped moving me.

9
The rightists have one virtue the leftists lack: they have never harbored illusions about the system. Their motto is “advance one pawn a day, and persistence brings success.” I sometimes think the rightists may be the ones who truly understand the essence of Chairman Mao’s “Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountains.”[4] For decades they have kept to one goal, single-mindedly, and have already achieved a great deal. They are just one kick away from the goal.

10
A hotpot restaurant that hangs out a sheep’s head and sells dog meat will not get a cent of my money, still less will I help the owner hawk it to wok-loving[5] customers who don’t know the truth. If someone smashes the place out of righteous anger, or to loot it, I’ll be glad to see it.

11
For most of my years as a writer, my feelings and standpoint were petty-bourgeois. This includes the works from the 1990s to the mid-2010s that marked my so-called turn from the avant-garde to the “bottom layer.” Only after 2018 did I change from a petty-bourgeois left-wing intellectual into a writer who truly writes from the standpoint of the proletariat. Black and White is my gift to that lost class.

12
In this age, everything is fragmenting: people, thought, writing. They seem freer and livelier than at any time in history, yet they are less free and more powerless than ever, unable to come together into a force for change before they are swept away by tsunamis of information foam. So it is with self-media writing, Weibo included. Under the domination and promotion of power and capital, many big influencers have countless fans, but lack the depth and force that traditional writing once had. (Incidentally, traditional writing died long ago; even where it survives, it is a walking corpse.) Changing this situation urgently requires the birth of a new thought, a new writing, and new people, which I call the “New Three Antis”:[6] anti-capital, anti-power, anti-elite. This will be the only revolutionary force in the age of information explosion, a writing that truly belongs to the proletariat.

13
There are two forbidden zones in contemporary Chinese history. The Cultural Revolution is one. As for the other, I’m afraid few people remember it any more, especially the young born after the 1990s.

14
I may have made many mistakes in my life, but the one thing I did most right was, at fifty-five, to break completely with the elite, in a way no one expected, and to recover a faith I had long lost.

15
In the mid-1970s, when I was still in primary school, I saw a production team use a combine to harvest wheat. That machine was much bigger than this one. It could only thresh, and had to stay fixed on the team’s threshing ground, but it was already impressive. The commune members gathered around it, and in a single day and night it threshed and stored the wheat that would have taken the whole team several days, and let people feel the power of mechanization. I described this scene in my novel The Human Realm. Later I thought of writing a short story called “The Commune’s First Combine Harvester,” but never got around to it. What I want to say is that, at the development model and pace of that time, China might well have fully mechanized its agriculture by the 1980s or 90s.

16
“Guard against the right, but chiefly prevent the left.”[7] The standard for judging what counts as “left” naturally lies in the hands of those on the right, just as in the first thirty years the standard for judging the “right” lay in the hands of those on the left. This is how class struggle shows itself inside the system once political and cultural leadership have changed hands. For more than forty years, it is not only the schools that the bourgeoisie has ruled. In the rightists’ own words: our people are everywhere.

17
Where in China today is there any ultra-left? There is only the ultra-right. The so-called “ultra-left” are merely cadres, ordinary people, and intellectuals who hope for a return to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and socialism as the Constitution defines them. When such people are regarded as the “ultra-left,” the nature of Chinese society goes without saying.

Translator’s notes

[1] The Fruit Party (果党): a mocking homophone for the Kuomintang, whose “Father of the Nation” is Sun Yat-sen. The passage is, of course, ironic.

[2] Reinforcements Arrive Tomorrow (《援军明日到达》, 2024): a war film whose portrayal of the period stirred controversy online. The opening of this item is missing in the original.

[3] “The cuckoo still weeps blood”: from “Seeing Off Spring” by the Song poet Wang Ling. The cuckoo, said to sing until it coughs blood, is a symbol of unyielding longing. Qu Yuan (c. 340–278 BCE), the poet who drowned himself in despair for his country, is the archetype of the loyal but rejected patriot.

[4] “The Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountains” (愚公移山): an ancient fable that Mao made famous in a 1945 speech, about an old man who sets out to dig away two mountains, generation after generation.

[5] “Wok-loving” (爱锅): a mocking homophone for 爱国 (“patriotic”).

[6] “New Three Antis” (新三反): a play on the “Three Antis” campaign of 1951–52 (against corruption, waste, and bureaucratism).

[7] “Guard against the right, but chiefly prevent the left”: from Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour talks of 1992.

Random Thoughts (6)

Liu Jiming · May 17, 2024 · Source: Liu Jiming | Weibo

Most of the exploited and oppressed have long since been made servile and have lost their class consciousness. Until the class consciousness of the proletariat is reawakened, class struggle in the true sense does not, in fact, exist.

1
Since Black and White, Weibo has become one of my main forms (genres) of writing.

2
When capitalists put on the vest of “the people,” does exploitation cease to exist?

3
That a country which took power through class struggle should, within just a few decades, have scrubbed “class,” “class struggle,” and every related concept clean out of people’s minds: one has to call it a miracle.

4
Most of the exploited and oppressed have long since been made servile and have lost their class consciousness. Until the class consciousness of the proletariat is reawakened, class struggle in the true sense does not, in fact, exist.

5
When a country turns a blind eye to the killing and the human-rights violations committed by other countries, on the grounds that “sovereignty outranks human rights” or some other high-sounding pretext, it is hard to believe that this country will treat its own citizens well.

6
“Those who labor with their minds rule others; those who labor with their hands are ruled by others.”[1] I have to say this article is a confession by the bourgeoisie, a match for that earlier article which cursed poor people as “poor wretches” and “stupid dogs.”

7
[A question to think about] 1. Parades and demonstrations are a basic right through which citizens express their views, regardless of capitalism or socialism; they are standard in any modern democracy. 2. Parades and demonstrations easily lead to unrest and even riots, and are a cause of disruption to social harmony and stability. In Western countries, for instance, and in our own country during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” people took to the streets every few days. With everything in such chaos, how can you carry out economic construction? Which of these two views do you favor, and why?

8
In my dictionary, the proletariat and the working people are far greater than the concepts of state and nation. In other words, a true communist must first of all be an internationalist.

9
Many people inside the system today (above all corrupt officials and rightist public intellectuals) hate the Teacher far more than they hate “Chang Kai-shen.” In their hearts, the legal lineage that Reform and Opening inherited is not New China’s, but the Republic’s. This is the source of the historical nihilism and political incest seen in disputes such as the one over the “Father of the Nation.”

10
If even “Monk Kong” is considered left, then I have not been wronged in the least by being branded “ultra-left.”

11
In commemoration of the 206th anniversary of the birth of the great teacher Marx. Let us remember Chairman Mao’s teaching: “Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be summed up in one sentence: to rebel is justified. Following this principle, we resist, we struggle, we build socialism.”[2]

12
When they said socialism meant developing the productive forces, I chose to believe them. When they said Reform and Opening was socialism perfecting itself, I still chose to believe them. But when someone turned Marxism’s “to rebel is justified, to make revolution is no crime” into “to rebel is unjustified, to exploit is meritorious,” and boiled the doctrine of proletarian liberation down into a pot of bourgeois-nationalist chicken soup for the soul, I stopped believing, and I will no longer stay silent.

13
[A question to think about] What is the difference between the “Four Modernizations” proposed by Premier Zhou Enlai in his 1975 Government Work Report[3] and the new era’s “Chinese-style modernization”?

14
If the line is drawn at a monthly income below 1,000 yuan, China has 600 million poor people,[4] more than a hundred times as many as America. They have the right to pursue a life of dignity and to make their voices heard.

15
I cannot predict whether the protest movement now spreading[5] will grow into a new people’s revolution and national liberation movement against capitalism and racism. But I believe that every judgment of justice and evil, light and darkness, must be examined anew only after class politics, long absent, returns to our field of vision. A final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should not be expected from the existing international political system, but from the awakening and resistance of the long-suppressed proletariat of every country, Palestine, Israel, and “America and the West” included. Only thus can this unjust world be fundamentally changed.

16
If the proletariat does not study and master the intellectual weapon of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, an even more wretched fate awaits it.

17
[A question to think about] Without Lenin, is Marxism still Marxism?

18
Let me say what Hu Xijin left unsaid. Everyone has faults and shortcomings, so let’s stop criticizing this and that. Make things easy for others and you make them easy for yourself, and above all don’t go “digging up graves” or doing that Cultural Revolution stuff. You’re fine, I’m fine, everyone’s fine. Black cat or white cat, a cat that catches mice is a good cat.[6] Isn’t it sweet to keep quiet and make a fortune? As for those who can’t make a fortune... being a leek for the harvest isn’t so bad either.

19
It was plainly a teardown and a rebuild. Even the owner of the house was replaced, and the two roads taken were completely different. Yet Professor Jin “the Big Bamboozler”[7] insists it was just an ordinary redecoration, and a lot of people actually believe him.

20
[A question to think about] The “original aspiration” in “never forget the original aspiration” refers to: 1. the original aspiration of founding the Party; 2. the original aspiration of founding the nation; 3. the original aspiration of Reform and Opening.

21
When I was in primary school, I too was a Little Red Guard (everyone in my class was, except the children of landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists). I wore a diamond-shaped armband with the words “Little Red Guard” in Chairman Mao’s handwriting, laminated in plastic, and felt very proud. When the rightist thugs call me “a remnant of the Cultural Revolution,” they seem to have a point.

Translator’s notes

[1] “Those who labor with their minds rule others”: from Mencius. Liu is quoting an article, which he does not name, that used the line to justify social hierarchy.

[2] “To rebel is justified”: from Mao’s speech in Yan’an in December 1939, celebrating Stalin’s sixtieth birthday.

[3] The “Four Modernizations”: the modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology, first set out by Zhou Enlai in 1964 and reaffirmed in his last Government Work Report in January 1975.

[4] 600 million poor people: in May 2020, Premier Li Keqiang said that some 600 million Chinese had a monthly income of barely 1,000 yuan.

[5] The protest movement: the protests over the war in Gaza that spread across American and European university campuses in spring 2024.

[6] “Black cat or white cat”: Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxim. “Keep quiet and make a fortune” (闷声发大财): a phrase made famous by Jiang Zemin in 2000.

[7] Professor Jin “the Big Bamboozler” (金大忽悠): an online nickname for Jin Canrong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University and a popular nationalist commentator.

Random Thoughts (5)

Liu Jiming · April 26, 2024 · Source: Cao Zhenglu–Liu Jiming Research Center | Weibo

That a dog’s life should be so precious is yet another marvel of an absurd age.

1
[Questions to think about] One: about the first thirty years, one person says there were too many idlers, another that the masses were too zealous. Which of them is lying? Two: if a politics is built on lies, how long can it last? (Note: the second question is general and not aimed at anyone in particular.)

2
That a dog’s life should be so precious is yet another marvel of an absurd age.

3
If we really want to learn from Mao Zedong, we should learn from his proletarian standpoint of always standing “on the side of the great majority of working people,” his indomitable will to struggle, and his revolutionary spirit in declaring all-out war on feudal privilege and hierarchy. We should not castrate his brilliant thought, distort his noble character, diminish his great image, and remake him into a harmless idol to deceive the people, in the service of the very capitalist road he criticized and opposed.

4
A few days ago in Nanjing I heard that Jiangsu was holding a “National Reading Month,” and that the guests the organizers had planned to invite included the writer Mo Yan and the scholar Kong Qingdong. When the list went to the relevant departments for review, Mo Yan sailed through, but Professor Kong was struck off. I was not the least bit surprised, because “Guard against the right, but chiefly prevent the left.”

5
[A question to think about] Without “Reform and Opening,” China today would be: 1. still “poor, isolated, and rigid,” far behind the developed capitalist countries; 2. perhaps somewhat slower in economic growth than now, but on the whole keeping pace with the world, steadily narrowing the gap. Above all, there would be no polarization of rich and poor, no rampant corruption, no moral collapse, no flood of unchecked desire, and social equality and the people’s happiness would be far higher than in most countries over the same period; 3. thanks to the material base, political and cultural foundations, and momentum built up in the first thirty years, and the advantages of the socialist system, not slower at all, but perhaps faster. And had China, as a beacon of world socialism, not gone dark, the Soviet Union would not have collapsed, the socialist camp would not have fallen like dominoes, and capitalism could never have come to rule the world again. There would be more and more socialist countries, not fewer and fewer and ever more fake. By now, the great ideal of communism might even have become reality. Which of these three views do you agree with, and why?

6
To write openly and viciously cursing poor people as “poor wretches” and “stupid dogs” is rare even in the capitalist West. Apart from “the evil old society,” probably only today’s “golden age” would see such a thing.

7
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Li Guangxi’s “Toast Song” was all the rage. Like Dong Wenhua’s “The Story of Spring,”[1] nearly everyone could sing it. Yesterday I suddenly heard it again. Its words, its music, and its performance were so full of feeling and jubilation, just like his “Ode to Beijing” of 1971, that I suddenly felt like throwing up. When Li Guangxi died the year before last, the arts world mourned him as if they had lost a parent, and heaped praise on him. I have to say that the degeneration of the arts world did not begin in recent years. It began more than forty years ago.

8
The enslavement of people by power and by capital is the root of all inequality in human society. The former works by open coercion. The latter works covertly, shaping people’s ideas through money and creating the illusion that their condition is voluntary and reasonable, so that they become blind to their own enslavement. Above all, when power and capital unite, it becomes all the more deceptive. That is why Lu Xun said that Chinese history has known only two kinds of times: “times when people long in vain to be slaves, and times when they are for the time being securely slaves.”[2]

9
Civilizational determinism, and even racism, are the spiritual sources of nationalism. The fascism that brought such catastrophe on humankind in the twentieth century was a monster grown from that source. The new prevalence of nationalism in the twenty-first century is the inevitable product of the global setbacks of communism, and of the return to world domination of a capitalism (represented by America) marked by the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest, and power politics.

10
Civilizational determinism is merely a contemporary variant of Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations. The only difference is that it reverses the 1980s claim that the blue (Western) civilization is superior to the yellow (Chinese) one.[3] From a Marxist point of view, it is as untenable as economic determinism.

11
Every civilization is “unique in the world,” just as every person is an individual who cannot be copied.

12
I used to loathe the public intellectuals most of all. At some point, the objects of my loathing became the fifty-centers, and even the little pinks.

13
For those who slander, day after day, the era that valued justice and equality above any other in history, I have only one word: contemptible.

14
To judge by the way he acts, Ma Shushan[4] has something of that Mao-era spirit of daring to challenge every unreasonable system. He may well have been a rebel during the Cultural Revolution.

15
The original purpose of the petitioning system is to give ordinary people, whose rights and interests have been violated and who cannot get redress from their own work unit or at their own level, a legal channel and a democratic right to appeal to higher authorities. In practice, however, localities everywhere, in the name of “maintaining stability” and on the grounds that “petitioning must not skip levels,” spare no expense in money and manpower to intercept petitioners at every level, and even retaliate against them, detaining and abusing them illegally. This effectively strips the people of their right to petition, and amounts to abolishing the legitimacy of the petitioning system itself. It is a grave violation of “socialist democracy,” and must be stopped.

16
Should the whistleblower Ma Shushan be commended, or given “criticism and education”? Is anonymous reporting wrong? In the Mao era, how would Ma Shushan have been treated?

That is exactly the problem. After nearly thirty years of socialist revolution and construction, China has gone back to the New Democratic Revolution, just as the saying goes: “Thirty years of toil, and overnight we’re back before Liberation.” (In reply to a comment by @LeisheA: “China’s New Democratic Revolution was in essence a bourgeois-democratic revolution led by the Communist Party.”)

Translator’s notes

[1] “Toast Song” (《祝酒歌》, 1978) and “The Story of Spring” (《春天的故事》, 1994): the first celebrated the fall of the Gang of Four; the second, sung by Dong Wenhua, celebrated Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour. Li Guangxi (1929–2022) had earlier sung “Ode to Beijing” (《北京颂歌》) in praise of Mao’s China.

[2] Lu Xun’s two kinds of times: from his essay “Random Thoughts Under the Lamp” (《灯下漫笔》, 1925). The line is often misquoted online as “two kinds of people.”

[3] “Blue” and “yellow” civilization: the contrast drawn in the 1988 television documentary River Elegy (《河殇》), which set China’s “yellow” land-bound civilization against the “blue” maritime civilization of the West.

[4] Ma Shushan (马树山): a retired local official in Henan who was detained after anonymously reporting alleged wrongdoing by local leaders, a case that drew national attention.

Random Thoughts (4)

Liu Jiming · April 9, 2024 · Source: Cao Zhenglu–Liu Jiming Research Center

The Kuomintang did not fall because of corruption. Corruption was only the surface. The root cause was that it degenerated from a revolutionary party into a clique of the powerful, representing the interests of feudalism, imperialism, and bureaucrat-capitalism.

1
The mainstream elites and popular opinion are always at odds. Whoever is “cursed” most fiercely by ordinary people, the mainstream praises all the more eagerly. This certainly reflects the arrogance and impunity of the elite clique, but it also exposes a deep crisis lurking in Chinese society.

2
At first, the Three-Body fans flatly refused to admit that The Three-Body Problem is Scar literature.[1] When they could no longer deny it, they turned on their critics: the Resolution itself says the Cultural Revolution was “ten years of catastrophe,” so why can’t it be criticized?[2] But they dare not take the question further: whose scars, whose catastrophe, were “those ten years”?

3
Hu Xijin has been slapped in the face again. How strange it is: the moment public opinion touches the crony bourgeoisie, old Hu drops from “high intelligence” to “low intelligence,” and switches from presuming guilt toward those he labels “populists” and “ultra-leftists” to presuming innocence.

4
An author who calls himself my friend has written a long, sprawling article “taking issue” with a Weibo post of mine from a few days ago, accusing me of being “left in form but right in essence” and turning the label of “fake Marxist” back on me. I’ll repost it for him, so that everyone can see how some contemporary revisionists, under the banner of nationalism-statism, distort the theory of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, parade themselves about, and deceive the masses.

5
When my father died I was only nineteen; when my mother died I was thirty-nine. The grief of being torn from my own flesh and blood cut me to the heart. Now that I am old, and come back to my hometown, and stand before my parents’ graves overgrown with grass, that old pain of eternal separation is gone. Thinking that the day I will be with them again has come a step closer, I feel a touch of comfort.

6
Democracy has a class character. Compared with feudal despotism, bourgeois democracy is undoubtedly progress. But for the proletariat, democracy in capitalist society is a false democracy, in essence a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And for the bourgeoisie and the revisionists (the nationalist-statists), socialist democracy (the dictatorship of the proletariat) is also a false democracy, even a catastrophe. In a class society, so-called democracy for all the people cannot exist.

7
Feudalism and capitalism are both enemies of the proletariat. Failing to see this is the real tragedy of the left, and stressing only one of them is also wrong. At the present stage, China’s proletariat suffers double exploitation and oppression from both, its situation is harsher than that of the proletariat in the capitalist West, and its struggle is all the more arduous.

8
[A question to think about] Some people naively believe that by passing a few resolutions they can stop people from seeking the historical truth and pursuing the truth. If so, wouldn’t “history is written by the people” become an empty phrase?

9
In reflecting on history, one cannot reflect only on the first thirty years while forbidding reflection on the latter thirty, or even cut blank holes in history and fence off forbidden zones.[3] That does not accord with historical dialectics. You cannot criticize historical nihilism while practicing historical nihilism on a grand scale.

10
Marx and Engels said that the theory of the Communists can be summed up in a single sentence: the abolition of private property. They also pointed out that private property can be abolished only through class struggle. This was their greatest contribution to scientific socialism. Making the dictatorship of the proletariat the fundamental guarantee of the socialist system was Lenin’s development of and contribution to Marxism. The theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Mao Zedong set out as the only road to consolidating the socialist system and preventing the restoration of capitalism, was his major development of and contribution to Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism represents three theories and three historical stages of the international communist movement, and forms an indivisible whole. To speak only of Marxism and not of Leninism and Maoism is a stock trick of contemporary revisionists. Today we stand at a fourth stage after Marxism-Leninism-Maoism: how to continue the revolution under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. This is a theoretical question and a practical one, and a question that no true Communist can avoid.

11
After 1979, the rightists pinned the whole blame for the myth of “ten thousand jin per mu”[4] on the Teacher, who had been the first to oppose it and stop the wind of exaggeration, while “Rice-Flyer,” one of its originators, became a spotless white lotus.

12
My father-in-law, nearly ninety, is a retired university professor and a veteran Party member who has received the commemorative medal for “Fifty Glorious Years in the Party.” Chatting last night, he said: “I saw it with my own eyes. In the few years before the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, the officials at county and township level were not as corrupt as the propaganda said (I don’t know about the higher levels). They were much cleaner than many of our cadres now!” His words shocked me. What could have turned an old man who normally cannot bear to hear a “bad word” about the Communist Party, and who has been a Party member for more than half a century, into a “Fruit fan”?[5]

13
The Kuomintang did not fall because of corruption. Corruption was only the surface. The root cause was that it degenerated from a revolutionary party into a clique of the powerful, representing the interests of feudalism, imperialism, and bureaucrat-capitalism. “A just cause finds much support; an unjust one finds little.”[6] This is an unshakable truth. A party, a government, however powerful, will surely perish if it goes against this truth.

14
The investigation says that the child’s parents and maternal grandfather became senior executives at the Agricultural Development Bank[7] through open recruitment, marriage, and “historical” reasons. This confirms that netizens’ indignation at the hereditary privilege of the powerful was neither groundless nor “making a political mountain out of a molehill.” Yet Hu Xijin pretends not to see it, deliberately plays it down, and changes the subject. His skill at confusing right and wrong and turning black into white is breathtaking.

15
The Teacher had a heart as boundless as the sea, as merciful as a Buddha’s, yet the rightists have slandered him as a tyrant and cursed him for decades.

(Selected from Liu Jiming’s Weibo. Compiled by the Cao Zhenglu–Liu Jiming Research Center.)

Translator’s notes

[1] The Three-Body Problem as Scar literature: Liu Cixin’s science-fiction trilogy opens with a scene of Red Guard violence during the Cultural Revolution, which drives its heroine to betray humanity.

[2] The Resolution: the Party’s 1981 “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party,” which called the Cultural Revolution “ten years of catastrophe” (十年浩劫).

[3] “Cut blank holes” (开天窗): literally “open a skylight,” the old term for blank spaces left in a newspaper where censored articles were removed.

[4] “Ten thousand jin per mu” (亩产万斤): the wildly inflated grain-yield claims of the Great Leap Forward (1958). “Rice-Flyer” (稻上飞) is an online nickname whose target the author leaves implicit.

[5] “Fruit fan” (果粉): a pun. It normally means an Apple fan, but here plays on the “Fruit Party” (果党), the mocking name for the Kuomintang.

[6] “A just cause finds much support”: from Mencius.

[7] The Agricultural Development Bank case (2024): an online furor over nepotism at the state-owned Agricultural Development Bank of China, in which an official investigation confirmed that a young woman’s parents and grandfather had all held senior posts at the bank.

Random Thoughts (3)

Liu Jiming · April 3, 2024 · Source: Official Weibo of the Cao Zhenglu–Liu Jiming Research Center

The total negation of the Cultural Revolution was a deadly dart the latter thirty years hurled at the first thirty. They thought it had hit the bull’s-eye. Little did they know it was a boomerang, and will come back to kill the thrower.

1
As a child I watched the film Sparkling Red Star and heard Deng Yuhua sing “Azaleas Red,”[1] and felt a touch of joy within its gentle sadness. Later I heard Dao Lang sing the same song, and could hear only a sorrow that pierced the heart. At first I thought it was because I had grown old. Later I understood. Back then I could hear joy because there was something to hope for: at midnight one longed for the dawn, in the dead of winter one longed for the spring wind, and when the azaleas bloomed all over the hills, the Red Army would come back. Now there is nothing left to hope for. The azaleas on the hills have bloomed crop after crop, but Commissar Mao’s Red Army has not come back, and may never come back again. And Hu Hansan,[2] who came back long ago, is more cunning, more vicious, and more frenzied than ever...

2
From these artworks you can feel it: that was an era that abolished the man-eating system of exploitation and oppression; an era in which the masses were self-confident, self-reliant, proud, and held their heads high, truly masters of the country; an era in which officials and people were equals, high and low were of one mind, and patriotic fervor was higher than ever before. Such an era had never existed before in Chinese or world history, and probably never will again. Sadly, I caught only the tail end of that era. When Chairman Mao died in 1976, I was only thirteen, a boy who knew nothing of the world. But as Jiang Wen has said, I did, after all, live a few years in his era. That was my good fortune. It is precisely because of this that I have the ability to recognize and criticize capitalism, feudalism, and every unequal society, and that I was able, before growing entirely old, to recover the faith I had lost. Netizens should have no trouble seeing this in the protagonists of Black and White and The Human Realm.

3
Like many rightist elites, Hu Xijin has always lived in the 1980s. People like him are everywhere in the circles of art, journalism, politics, and business. In their eyes, Reform and Opening is not a means but an end. What that end is, they never say outright. In any case, the power of discourse is in their hands. They call a deer a horse and turn black into white, and say whatever they like, for example in how they define socialism and capitalism, or ultra-left and ultra-right. This is a major reason for the unprecedented ideological confusion of the past several decades.

4
To stop speaking and writing for fear of having your account closed, being silenced, or being disciplined is no different from giving up the right and the courage to live for fear of death. It is cowardice.

5
Mo Yan’s position is there for all to see; the whole planet knows it. That inscription of his would certainly have counted as nakedly counter-revolutionary speech in the first thirty years. But against the background of the latter thirty, there seems to be nothing much wrong with it.

6
The total negation of the Cultural Revolution was a deadly dart the latter thirty years hurled at the first thirty. They thought it had hit the bull’s-eye. Little did they know it was a boomerang, and will come back to kill the thrower.

7
From the internet-wide denunciation of Fang Fang a few years ago to the recent uproar over the lawsuit against Mo Yan, China’s elites and masses have become two irreconcilable classes, and a social rift that was already serious has been pushed beyond healing. This situation is probably unique in the world.

8
In a sense, today’s “big grain-growing households” are more exploitative than the landlords of the past. Most landlords of old built up their land bit by bit (though not without seizing some by force or fraud). Today’s big households, backed by the government, take over peasants’ land through “land transfer” at rock-bottom prices. No wonder Ximen Nao went to the King of Hell to cry injustice.[3]

9
[A question to think about] What is the difference between the people’s democratic dictatorship and the dictatorship of the proletariat?

10
Whether one stands on the side of nationalism-statism or on the side of the exploited and oppressed classes is the fundamental criterion for telling true Marxism from false.

11
[A question to think about] If you lived in the “Rakshasa Kingdom,”[4] your choice would be: one, love it; two, change it; three, go along with its corruption; four, keep yourself pure.

12
Last year I wrote a short review of The Three-Body Problem, calling it a science-fiction version of “Scar literature.” Mr. Guo Songmin reposted it on the Fengwen community,[5] and a mob of Three-Body fans cursed the two of us up and down. Now that old Hu has confirmed it in black and white, those Three-Body fans have gone quiet. This shows clearly that they are of one kind with old Hu. The pluralism and tolerance they always talk about are not for those they consider “ultra-left.” In other words, only they may pin labels on others and beat them with sticks. No one may criticize or question them; anyone who does is an “ultra-leftist” or a “remnant of the Cultural Revolution.”

13
I would like to ask Mr. Hu Xijin a few questions: 1. What is “positive energy”? 2. Is the power to define it in your hands? 3. When you speak, do you speak only for yourself, or for some organization?

14
A few more questions for Hu Xijin: who are the “they” you speak of? The rightists, or the ultra-leftists you are always going on about? Raising “their” words to the level of CIA manipulation: isn’t that exactly the kind of “spy-hunting” you yourself criticize? Do you have evidence for it? If not, isn’t this political framing? Please answer, and fans who support old Hu’s view are welcome to answer too.

15
A netizen told me that in Weibo comment sections and on many online platforms, words like “communism” and “Chairman Mao” have become sensitive words. I don’t know whether it’s true.

16
[A question to think about] Drawing on the relevant remarks of the Chief Architect,[6] answer: was “speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great debates, and writing big-character posters” socialist democracy and freedom, or “the democracy and freedom of the capitalist West”?

Translator’s notes

[1] Sparkling Red Star (《闪闪的红星》, 1974) and “Azaleas Red” (《映山红》): a children’s film about a boy whose father leaves with the Red Army on the Long March. Its theme song, sung by Deng Yuhua, expresses the hope that the Red Army will return when the azaleas bloom. The pop singer Dao Lang later recorded a cover.

[2] Hu Hansan (胡汉三): the landlord villain of Sparkling Red Star, famous for his line on returning to the village after the Red Army has left: “I, Hu Hansan, am back!”

[3] Ximen Nao (西门闹): the landlord in Mo Yan’s novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, who is executed during land reform and goes to the King of Hell to protest his innocence. Liu turns Mo Yan’s figure against him.

[4] The “Rakshasa Kingdom” (罗刹国): from Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a land where values are inverted and the ugliest people are thought the most beautiful.

[5] Fengwen community (风闻社区): the discussion forum of the nationalist news site Guancha.cn.

[6] The Chief Architect: Deng Xiaoping, who had the “Four Bigs” removed from the Constitution in 1980.

Random Thoughts

Liu Jiming · February 24, 2024 · Source: Cao Zhenglu–Liu Jiming Research Center | Weibo

More than forty years have passed. What kind of spring do the great majority of the people long for today?

1
In form, the BBS forums and self-media platforms (Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, and so on) of the internet age can be called a revival of big-character posters, speaking out freely and airing views fully, and great debates. In this sense, the Western scholars of “Cultural Revolution studies” who call the Cultural Revolution (in full, the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”) the most far-reaching movement of intellectual emancipation of the twentieth century are not without reason.

2
This winter’s second snowfall should probably be called a spring snow. I remember that in the early 1980s, many rightist, or “right-turning,” men of letters liked to quote the English poet Shelley: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” The spring they longed for was the spring of Reform and Opening. More than forty years have passed. What kind of spring do the great majority of the people long for today?

3
From either a political or a legal standpoint, the lawsuit against Mo Yan will come to nothing. Years ago, Utopia organized 100,000 people to bring a public suit against a certain Mao, and a few years ago the whole internet denounced “Diary Fang” and called for her punishment.[1] What these two said and did was far worse than Mo Yan. And what came of it? Weren’t they protected as carefully as giant pandas? Remember, in the eyes of the authorities, they are their own people. “Guard against the right, but chiefly prevent the ‘left.’”

4
A film about losing weight takes the whole country by storm, and then Jia Ling’s dog trends on social media.[2] This society is seriously ill.

5
Why do so many people feel that the programs of the Spring Festival Gala are growing ever more fake, as if in a world completely different from the real life we know?

6
The New Year is here. Happy Spring Festival and best wishes to all the readers of Black and White and to all my followers and friends! May the days of the exploited and oppressed classes grow better day by day, and the days of the exploiting and oppressing classes rot away day by day!

7
I am sixty-one this year. If before fifty-five I lived for literature, then after fifty-five I began to live, and to fight, for my faith.

8
After The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award, the China Writers Association treated its author like a found treasure and brought him onto its presidium.[3] The “dark world” in the writing of Liu Cixin and Mo Yan refers mainly to the first thirty years after the founding of New China (especially the Cultural Revolution), which in Chinese literary circles...

9
New China’s political and economic system was designed for the socialist road: public ownership and the planned economy in economics, people’s democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat in politics, and so on. Used to build socialism, such a system, with its high concentration of power and resources, has the advantage of being able to concentrate resources on great undertakings. That is why, in less than thirty years after the founding of New China, the economy kept up rapid growth (second only to the developed capitalist countries such as America, Britain, and Germany), and a poor, backward agricultural country was built into a prosperous, modern socialist industrial nation with a complete range of industries. Used for a market economy or capitalism, the same system also has advantages that Western capitalist systems lack. Its high centralization and power of mobilization can turn collectivized agriculture and industry from public into private property at astonishing speed: dissolving the people’s communes at a single command, for example, or restructuring state enterprises so that tens of millions of workers were laid off. This “advantage” let China maintain rapid growth for decades after Reform and Opening, and the productive forces developed by leaps and bounds. But its negative consequences grew and spread in step. The concentration of resources and wealth in a few hands, brought about by the high concentration of power, made China one of the most corrupt and unequal countries in the world. In a sense, a social system is neither good nor bad in itself. A socialist system can be used to build capitalism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat can turn into the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. A capitalist system can also be used to build socialism, and elite democracy can turn into mass democracy. Some Nordic countries that practice welfare capitalism, for example, have more socialist elements than many former socialist countries steeped in the blood and brutality of capitalism’s age of primitive accumulation. So with any given social system, what matters is what it is used for. If it is used to benefit the majority, it is good; if it is used to serve the interests of the few, it is bad. It is as simple as that.

10
“The whole country is brimming with an optimistic, upbeat atmosphere.” This People’s Daily report has flooded the internet today. It reminds me of a few years ago, also on the eve of the Spring Festival, when a CCTV reporter went around the streets with a microphone asking everyone he met, “Are you happy?” One man answered: “My name’s not Fu, it’s Zeng.”[4]

11
Every holiday, the expressways are toll-free. This was meant as a benefit for the people. But today, the people at the bottom who cannot afford a car are still the majority of Chinese. The state waives tolls for private car owners who hardly need the money, while raising the fares of the buses and coaches on which ordinary people depend. Such a policy not only violates the ideals of fairness and justice written into the “core socialist values,” it runs directly counter even to the ancient Chinese value of “helping those in danger and relieving those in need.” I urge officials at every level not to turn “serving the people” into serving the few. Rather than talking empty, false words all day long and putting on a show of visiting the needy at the Spring Festival, they would do better to save a little of the stability-maintenance budget, or take some money from the vast sums confiscated from corrupt officials, and cut fares, or make travel free, so that the people at the bottom too can enjoy a real benefit.

12
Suppose a man, every time he holds a ceremony to commemorate the birthday of his ancestor, praises the ancestor’s merits while listing the ancestor’s grave mistakes. What would the world think of him? (1) That he seeks truth from facts and is wiser than his ancestor. (2) That he is disloyal and unfilial, without benevolence or righteousness.

13
In terms of political position, there are three main kinds of people in Chinese society today. 1. People of the left (also called Maoists): they value social equality, oppose exploitation, oppression, and hierarchies of privilege, and want real socialism, not fake socialism. 2. People of the right (also called liberals): they advocate Western-style democracy and freedom, oppose feudal despotism, and want good capitalism, not bad capitalism. 3. Nationalist-statists (also called patriots): they don’t care whether it is socialist or capitalist, so long as the state (the nation) is strong, and regard both left and right as traitors. Besides these, there is another kind, who live only to rise in office and get rich, to chase fame and profit, or to eat, drink, and amuse themselves. Whoever feeds them is their mother, and opportunism is in their nature: the so-called refined egoists.[5] They are very numerous, but since they have no clear political orientation, they cannot form a camp of their own and are basically a rabble. Once society is thrown into great turmoil, they will quickly split off into the first three groups.

14
I read the “Wall Street Club” article and found it full of questionable points. A few examples, for your consideration. First: America represents the world’s most advanced system, and China’s Reform and Opening means taking the American road (they long ago stopped regarding Reform and Opening as socialism perfecting itself, its “original aspiration”). This definition of Reform and Opening suits the thinking and interests of the elite clique very well. Yet criticism of Reform and Opening is not allowed; any criticism is called extremism. Doesn’t this “those who obey me prosper, those who resist me perish” contradict American-style democracy? Second: even if, as the article says, capitalism is an ideal social system, aren’t there still good and bad kinds? Faced with an inferior capitalism that breeds oligarchs like “Belt” Xu and “Eighth Master” Liu,[6] or with what Old Tian calls gangster capitalism, shouldn’t we criticize it? Third: the article says that “the economic model before Reform and Opening,” that is, Mao-era socialism, is an economic system that failed the test of practice. May I ask who did the testing? The broad masses of the people? If not, if it was socialism’s opposites, capitalism or revisionism, can that serve as the criterion? Fourth: the article says Mr. Sima Nan is tearing society apart and undermining social stability. May I ask, then: is Sima Nan doing the tearing and undermining, or has society long been torn apart, with a struggle between two views and two roads, the socialist and the capitalist, going on all along?

15
Like many in the New Left, I once harbored so many reformist illusions, pinned my hopes on the so-called healthy forces inside the system, and for a time even believed in Gan Yang’s “unifying the three traditions.”[7] Had it not been for the fierce struggle around 2018, I could hardly have broken completely with the elite, as Wang Sheng does in Black and White, and returned to my own class.

16
On December 28 last year, I rode from my hotel to Shaoshan railway station and chatted with the young driver. I asked him what he thought of Chairman Mao’s “serious mistakes” in his later years. He said: whether the Chairman made mistakes or not is not for the officials to decide, and certainly not for a resolution or two to settle. It’s for the common people to decide. It’s like policies: whether they’re good or bad, the officials can’t say for themselves; you have to let the masses judge, right?

17
Why is it that many rightist big influencers set their Weibo to “visible for the past six months only,” while leftist big influencers seldom do?

18
“Concubinism”[8] has become a conspicuous label for Hu Xijin. As I understand it, it should apply not only to his attitude toward America and the West, but also to the crony capitalist-roader clique at home.

19
The Soviet revisionists betrayed Lenin, founder of Soviet socialism, so why did they not give Lenin a seventy-thirty verdict? Likewise, “Chang Kai-shen” betrayed Sun Yat-sen’s National Revolution and Three Principles of the People, so why did he not give Sun a seventy-thirty verdict, or say he had made grave mistakes, but instead revered him as the Father of the Nation?

20
Why is it that Mo Yan “slanders” and “smears” only the Communist Party of the first thirty years and of the New Democratic Revolution, and never “slanders” or “smears” the Communist Party of the latter thirty years and of Reform and Opening?

21
A netizen asked: how would you assess the Chinese literary world and its writers, great and small? My answer: today’s literary world has no real literature left, and no great writers or minor ones either. There is only a crowd of eunuchs, great and small, fawning on the powerful and scrambling for fame and gain.

Translator’s notes

[1] “A certain Mao” and “Diary Fang”: the original partly disguises the names. In 2011, the leftist website Utopia gathered signatures for a “public prosecution” of a prominent liberal economist over his criticism of Mao. “Diary Fang” refers to Fang Fang, whose Wuhan Diary (2020) provoked a nationalist backlash.

[2] The weight-loss film: YOLO (《热辣滚烫》, 2024), directed by and starring the comedian Jia Ling, who lost a great deal of weight for the role.

[3] Liu Cixin and the Hugo Award: The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015.

[4] “My name’s not Fu, it’s Zeng”: in a 2012 CCTV street-interview series, a migrant worker misheard 幸福 (xìngfú, “happy”) as 姓福 (xìng Fú, “is your surname Fu?”) and replied, “My surname is Zeng.” The exchange became a national joke.

[5] “Refined egoists” (精致的利己主义者): a phrase coined by the Peking University scholar Qian Liqun to describe students who are clever, worldly, and wholly self-serving.

[6] “Belt” Xu and “Eighth Master” Liu: mocking nicknames for Xu Jiayin of Evergrande and Liu Chuanzhi of Lenovo. Old Tian: a leftist online writer.

[7] Gan Yang’s “unifying the three traditions” (通三统): the scholar Gan Yang’s 2005 proposal to reconcile China’s Confucian tradition, Mao-era egalitarianism, and the market reforms of the Deng era.

[8] “Concubinism” (臣妾主义): a mocking label for Hu Xijin’s posture of servile deference, after the meme “Your concubine cannot do it” (臣妾做不到啊) from the television drama Empresses in the Palace.

Selected Random Thoughts

Liu Jiming · October 18, 2024 · Source: Human Realm Forum (WeChat public account)

1
New China was born when the old China, with its long feudal system and decadent culture, had come to the end of its road, when “the Chinese nation had reached its most perilous hour.”[1] Led and created by a proletarian party, it was a people’s state such as had never existed in history, with an entirely new socialist culture. Mainstream propaganda, however, splices this New China, reborn like a phoenix from the flames, seamlessly onto the “China” that runs from the Xia, Shang, and Zhou down to the Qing and the Republic, as if it were their faithful heir. It uses the historical narrative of the Chinese nation to dissolve and obscure the class character of “New China,” until one feels that National Day celebrates not seventy-five years since the founding of New China, but five thousand years of Chinese civilization.

5
Before the fall of the Ming, all kinds of rumors about the Chongzhen Emperor and the rebel leader Li Zicheng flew everywhere, and fear gripped the court and the country, until the Ming dynasty collapsed. So too before the fall of the Qing. On the eve of the Wuchang Uprising, rumors about the Qing court and the revolutionaries had spread through officialdom and the populace alike. Rather than say the Qing fell to the few bomb blasts of the 1911 uprising, it would be truer to say that it fell to a popular trust already on the verge of collapse. From this we can see that whenever a dynasty changes and great upheaval comes to society, rumors and jokes of every kind run especially wild. This is not because the rumormongers are so clever that people cannot tell truth from falsehood, but because people have lost faith in reality, and would rather believe the rumors are true. In this sense, rumors serve the special function of transmitting the popular will. The saying that “a rumor is a prophecy far ahead of its time”[2] is the best footnote to this social psychology.

6
I support any progressive social revolution that ends the capitalist system. But until such a revolution comes, I also support any social reform that eases the suffering of the exploited and oppressed classes, such as free medical care and free education. Faced with a critically ill patient, the first concern is to save him; everything else comes after. A society that turns patients away from hospitals to die because they have no money violates the laws of heaven and humanity, and must not be allowed to go on existing. As I see it, those cold-blooded “leftists” who reject and attack free medical care because public ownership cannot be fully restored have, objectively, put themselves against the people and become accomplices of the vested interests. In history, such people had a resounding name: armchair revolutionaries.[3]

Translator’s notes

[1] “The Chinese nation had reached its most perilous hour”: a line from “March of the Volunteers” (1935), the national anthem of the People’s Republic.

[2] “A rumor is a prophecy far ahead of its time”: an online pun. 谣言 (yáoyán, “rumor”) is read as 遥遥领先的预言 (yáoyáo lǐngxiān de yùyán, “a prophecy far ahead”).

[3] “Armchair revolutionaries” (空头革命家): an echo of Lu Xun’s warning, in his last testament, that his son should never become an “empty-headed writer” (空头文学家).