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THE CLOSING OF RENJING.NET — A DOSSIER

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        THE CLOSING OF RENJING.NET — A DOSSIER

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CONTENTS

  I.    Breaking News — The Human Realm Website Abruptly Shut Down

  II.   Essay — From The Human Realm to Renjing.net (Tu Men)

  III.  Essay — Starting from the Closing of Renjing.net (Tu Fuquan)

  IV.   Essay — "The Harmless Left" and "The Dangerous Left" (Xiaoxiao)

  V.    Poems — On the Closing of Renjing.net

  VI.   A Veteran Speaks — You Cannot Cover the Mouths of the People

  VII.  Editor's Note — Revisionism and Fascist Dictatorship

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I.  BREAKING NEWS

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[Breaking] The Human Realm Website Abruptly Shut Down!

Zuo Ping · September 8, 2026, 18:21

Zuo Ping has learned from sources close to the matter that the website of The Human Realm (Renjing.net) has been abruptly shut down; the site can no longer be opened. It is understood that the platform acted on instructions from the relevant authorities to cancel the Renjing.net domain name, without any reason being given.

The Human Realm was an emerging left-wing cultural website, founded on July 1, 2024. Since its launch it had held to the mission of "carrying on the red classics and promoting revolutionary culture," of being "a platform for the proletariat, a voice for the laboring people"; it upheld a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist standpoint, devoted itself to exploring the possibilities of twenty-first-century socialism, and had considerable influence among the broad community of internet users, particularly the young.

That The Human Realm should be shut down on the very eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Chairman Mao's passing struck many users as unacceptable. A person responsible for The Human Realm said: Better to be a martyr than to play the servile scholar. The website may have been shut down, but the flame of our conviction will not be extinguished.

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II.  ESSAY — From The Human Realm to Renjing.net

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From The Human Realm to Renjing.net; From "One Person" to "A Group of People"

Left Review · September 12, 2026, 08:05 · By Tu Men

After Renjing.net was shut down, its editor-in-chief Feizhou composed a ci poem under the title "The Fallen," casting an administrative act as a death suffered in a state of war. This escalation in narrative strategy points to the key that unlocks the intellectual bond between Liu Jiming and Renjing.net: the two characters renjing—"the human realm"—name not merely a website but a whole political image distilled out of literary creation, one that, in the instant of "falling in battle," completed its transformation from a literary sign into a political one.

I. The Human Realm: How a Novel Became the "Matrix" of a Body of Thought

The novel The Human Realm, published in 2016, holds a pivotal place in Liu Jiming's body of work. Critics have regarded it as a founding work of "New Socialist Literature," taking up the socialist literary tradition of Liu Qing's The Builders and Hao Ran's Bright Sunny Skies. Its protagonist, Ma La, after riding the swells of the business world and suffering a spell in prison, returns to his home village of Shenhuangzhou, organizes the "One Heart Cooperative," and sets out to explore whether a collective economy might be rebuilt. Ten years later, in May 2026, Liu Jiming visited Nanjie Village, where he shook hands and posed for a photograph with "Squad Leader" Wang Hongbin beneath the slogan "Serve the People," and held an in-depth exchange with him. Some commentators called the meeting "an encounter between two idealists."

This narrative frame already contains the germ of the Renjing.net that Liu Jiming would go on to found: a subject who "goes against the current," building an alternative form of collective organization within a space eroded on two fronts, by capital and by power. It mirrors Ma La in the novel, who "presses upstream against adversity," facing every kind of unfavorable condition—"farmland lying abandoned in the countryside, the draining away of labor, capital moving into the villages, the setbacks of socialism on a world scale." This tragic heroism of "doing what one knows cannot be done" was transplanted almost untouched into the positioning of Renjing.net—forming a structural correspondence with Liu Jiming's public role as a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist and a critical intellectual.

More telling still is the meaning carried by the word renjing itself. It is drawn from Tao Yuanming's line, "I built my hut in the human realm, yet hear no clamor of carriage and horse," but in Liu Jiming's usage the image is charged with a wholly new cultural-political content. Renjing points to "the condition of the people"—the lived circumstances of those at the bottom under the logic of capital, and the question of how "the people," as a political subject, might recover a voice. In taking over this name, the website signaled its intent to convert the concept of "the people" constructed in literature into a political signifier waiting to be filled.

II. From the Practice of "One Person" to the Practice of "A Group of People"

Some have compared Liu Jiming to Pun Ngai, the scholar long concerned with labor, but what sets Liu Jiming's practice apart among contemporary left-wing intellectuals is that it was never confined to solitary study or writing at a desk: he moved from the practice of "one person" to the practice of "a group of people." In 2017 he broke with the literary establishment; in 2020 he founded Midstream Magazine; in 2022 he advanced the concept of "the People's Left," setting off a debate in left-wing thought; in 2023 he founded a writing workshop; in 2024 Renjing.net went live. The trajectory is unmistakable.

The founding of the writing workshop especially repays analysis. Its stated aim of cultivating "red writers" required students to pass "the gate of feeling, the gate of standpoint, the gate of language," and raised these to the level of "class consciousness and the tempering of revolutionary will." At the graduation ceremony Liu Jiming stressed that the workshop "cares not only whether you write a good essay, but whether you can hold firm to communist conviction." Writing, in other words, was redefined as a form of political training, literary skill made subordinate to class standpoint.

Renjing.net institutionalized this logic: through a linked "workshop-website" model it trained its own authors, achieving a "self-generating" cultural production. In July 2026, Renjing.net was thoroughly reorganized, with outstanding graduates of the workshop stepping into editorial and managerial leadership—read by observers as "an institutional arrangement Liu Jiming made to keep the website from veering off course."

The significance of this step goes beyond the running of a platform. What it sought to build was a mechanism of cultural reproduction independent of the mainstream media system—editors, managers, and authors all emerging from the workshop, the readership cultivated within its own circles. Once such a mechanism begins to turn, "the front" ceases to be a mere figure of speech and becomes an organizational form capable of perpetuating itself, converting the practice of one person into the practice of a group.

III. The Politics of Naming: "Neither Wholly With Nor Wholly Apart"

The predicament of Renjing.net is rooted in part in the very tension the name renjing carries. As one analysis noted, Renjing.net "shares with official mainstream discourse such core symbols as 'red,' 'revolution,' and 'the laboring people,' while in its concrete interpretations it keeps a certain critical distance."

This posture of being "neither wholly with nor wholly apart" was no accidental tactic but an extension of the inner logic of The Human Realm. In the novel, Ma La's rebuilding of the cooperative draws its legitimacy from the shared symbol of "socialism," yet its concrete practice—organizing a collective economy against the tide, in an age of capital moving into the countryside—constitutes a swerve away from the established order. The shared symbol provides the opening through which one may speak; the critical interpretation marks off the distance from mainstream discourse.

The website carried this logic forward: it took "red," "revolution," and "the laboring people" as its core vocabulary, yet steered them toward a direction other than the official reading. Liu Jiming stated this position plainly in the "People's Left debate," faulting the nationalist left for "abandoning the 'total theory' of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism" and thereby leaving the left "like water without a source, a tree without roots." He was attempting, that is, to redefine the left through "genuine Marxism-Leninism-Maoism," and to draw a sharp line between himself and the "People's Left."

To name is to draw a boundary. The very name "Renjing.net" was a declaration of a positioning distinct from that of most left-wing platforms. Where the latter play the role of a "bridge"—speaking from within the mainstream framework—the "front" implied by renjing points toward an independent cultural production. Once that capacity for independent production began to operate as an organization, the activation of the logic of governance came as no surprise.

IV. The "Narrative of the Fallen": The Re-Politicization of a Literary Sign

After Renjing.net was shut down, Liu Jiming composed two ci poems in a relatively restrained key: "Do not lament that the front lies scattered; / why fear the frost-wind's battering— / the seed of fire was never spent." The response of the website's editor-in-chief Feizhou and deputy editor Yunkai—Liu Jiming's own students from the writing workshop—ran far hotter: under the title "The Fallen," the imagery rose from "the seed of fire" to "blood and sword."

The construction of this "narrative of the fallen" completed the final transformation of renjing from literary sign to political sign. In the novel, Ma La's cooperative is at last swept away by a flood, yet he keeps his dignity in defeat—an intertext with the figure of the "hero in his twilight years" in the poems Liu Jiming wrote after the website's closure. Renjing is no longer a space waiting to be filled with content; it has become a symbol that must be defended. When supporters describe the event with lines like "though dead, still living, they pass on the torch" and "the seed of fire was never spent," what they are in fact doing is using the tragic narrative of literature to absorb a political setback.

When renjing—a literary concept describing "the condition of the people"—turns into a political symbol commemorated through "falling in battle," the loop of Liu Jiming's intellectual trajectory closes: literature furnishes the imagination, organization furnishes the vehicle, and falling in battle furnishes the meaning. As one commentator observed, the website can be deregistered and the domain reclaimed, but "renjing," as a sign that has already entered the circulation of discourse, may find that its political and cultural life is only now beginning—just as Feizhou wrote in his "Fallen" poem: "Today you seal us in; / tomorrow we split open heaven and earth."

The literary rhetoric of that line cannot conceal its political imagination: a prophecy that an alternative future will, in the end, arrive. This confidence in a historical teleology is precisely the core inheritance Liu Jiming has drawn from the left-wing cultural tradition. As a platform, Renjing.net's life has come to a full stop; but its practice, from "one person" to "a group of people," has left a deep rut and endless illumination in the contemporary left-wing movement. It is, therefore, less an ending than a new beginning.

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III.  ESSAY — Starting from the Closing of Renjing.net

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Tu Fuquan: Starting from the Closing of Renjing.net

Renjing.net (archived)

On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Chairman Mao's passing this year, the left-wing website "Renjing.net" (The Human Realm) had its domain deregistered and was shut down. The authorities gave no reason; its founder wrote a poem in response—composed, and yet touched with a certain helplessness.

I. Who Is Afraid of Whom?

To make sense of this, one must first settle a basic question: what exactly was Renjing.net? By its own account, it was a left-wing cultural website that "stood for the proletariat and gave voice to the laboring people," holding to a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist standpoint. It was founded on July 1, 2024—a date of no small symbolic weight. It had a certain influence among young netizens, and had gathered a body of writers and readers who called themselves "the left."

So the question arises: in a great power that professes Marxism as its guiding ideology, why would a website upholding Marxism-Leninism-Maoism be banned? It is rather as if a restaurant hanging out a sign that reads "Authentic Sichuan Cuisine" were sealed up by the market-regulation bureau for "reasons unspecified." Was the food too spicy? Was the sign hung wrong? Or does the owner simply look too much like the fellow next door?

Marxism teaches us that the state is an instrument of class rule. The ruling class of a great power, however endlessly it declares that it "represents the fundamental interests of the broadest masses of the people," keeps, in the realm of ideology, a set of self-serving rules: what may be said and what may not; what may be openly propagated and what may only be muttered within small circles; which red is orthodox and which red is merely "characteristic."

Renjing.net's offense was that it tried to interpret the word "red." And the right of interpretation is precisely the thing the ruling class is least willing to share. You may sing red songs in the public square, but you may not ask "whose blood dyed that 'red' in the red songs red." You may commemorate Chairman Mao, but you may not press the question of "what, exactly, Chairman Mao was trying to do back then." The moment you begin to take seriously those symbols enshrined upon the altar, to hold them up against reality, to say "let us turn to the original texts and see what Marx actually said"—in that moment you have touched someone's cheese. Not the economic cheese, but the cheese of the right to interpret.

The ruling class does not object to your shouting "long live the laboring people"; it simply does not want you actually to organize the laboring people. It does not object to your "carrying on the red classics"; it just does not want you turning those classics to certain pages. It will permit you to be a "harmless leftist"—studying dialectics in your study, grumbling in your circle of friends, singing "The Internationale" at the year-end party. But the moment you move all this onto an open platform, facing the public, forming a following, even "training writers"—that is no longer scholarly interest; that is the first sprout of organized dissemination. Organization is the ruling class's most sensitive nerve: Zhao Gao, knowing full well that a deer and a horse are two different things, jumped at every shadow all the same.

So the closing of Renjing.net is not the problem of a single website, but one class's ideological guard against another.

II. A Deadly Game of "Neither Wholly With Nor Wholly Apart"

The tragedy of Renjing.net lay in this: it shared the ruling class's symbols, yet sought to wrest away the right to interpret them.

This is a structural conflict.

At the level of symbols, Renjing.net overlapped heavily with the great power's mainstream discourse: both speak of "red," both speak of "revolution," both speak of "the laboring people." This lent it, for a time, a kind of "symbolic legitimacy"—look, I too speak of red, I too speak of Chairman Mao, so on what grounds do you ban me?

But at the level of interpretation, it drifted ever further from the mainstream. In its concrete essays, it tried to mount a critical reconstruction from the standpoint of classical Marxism, tried to restore "red" from a decorative symbol to a critical weapon—and this touched the dragon's reverse scale. The ruling class's logic runs: the symbols are mine, and so is the right to interpret them. You may use my symbols, but you may not redefine them. Hence the conflict: the more Renjing.net stressed its own "orthodoxy," the more it insisted on "genuine Marxism-Leninism-Maoism," the more it made the mainstream discourse appear unorthodox. It is like a person standing before a mirror and saying, "the me in the mirror is not the real me"—there is nothing wrong with the mirror, but the one looking into it is displeased.

Subtler still is the timing: September 8, the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Chairman Mao's death. The choice of date is, how shall we put it, charged with the peculiar "precision" of the bureaucratic system. It was not banned on some random day; it was banned on a day carefully reckoned. It is like a meticulously arranged "tribute"—not a tribute to Chairman Mao, but a "gift package" presented to all who might think of making trouble under cover of the anniversary. The message: tomorrow is a sensitive day, so all of you settle down; today we shut one down first—kill the chicken to scare the monkeys.

This "precision strike" lays bare a curious blend of confidence and lack of confidence in the ruling class: confident, in that it knows shutting down a single website will raise no great storm; unconfident, in that it must clear away even the existence of one website on the eve of a sensitive day, and can offer no reasonable justification—acting, like the "gentleman on the beam," without ever saying so.

Then there is the conflict of circle-based dissemination. In the age of algorithmic recommendation, Renjing.net, through content aggregation, formed a "left-wing cultural circle" of sharply defined standpoint. Within this circle, mutual identification steadily intensified; between circles, common ground dissolved. To the ruling class this constitutes a latent threat: once people no longer form consensus through the mainstream media, but form identity within the interior of a circle, the cohering function of the mainstream ideology is challenged. And so the "governance" mechanism was activated—not on the judgment that the site was "illegal," but that it was "out of step with the times."

III. The Strangling, and the Limits

Thus the banning of Renjing.net on the eve of Chairman Mao's death anniversary is, in essence, the great power's ruling class strangling the open propagation of the left. This was not a simple case of handling a website's rule-breaking, but a counterstrike over ideological leadership. By deregistering the domain, the ruling class told all who would openly propagate left-wing thought: this microphone is not for you to use.

But what most repays reflection is what the affair exposes about the limits of open propagation and the open training of "red writers."

First, platform dependency. Renjing.net's domain, its servers, its channels of dissemination were all attached to the existing governance system—which means they could be severed at any moment. It is like a tenant: when the landlord tells you to move, move you must, and you cannot even take the furniture with you. Left-wing propaganda on an open platform is, in essence, building a house on someone else's foundation; however handsome the house, pull the foundation and the whole thing collapses.

Second, the narrowness of the legal symbolic space. Renjing.net tried to operate within the legal symbolic space, using vocabulary sanctioned by mainstream discourse—"red," "revolution," "the laboring people." But this strategy has a fatal weakness: to share symbols is not to share power. You may use "red," but you may not define "red." The moment you try to redefine it, the symbol's "cloak of legality" is withdrawn.

Third, the ready detectability of open training. To train red writers—the idea itself is full of ambition. But to conduct such training on an open platform is like practicing lock-picking outside the police station: however skilled the technique, it cannot survive being seen through at a glance. Open training means open recruitment, open organization, open dissemination—and every link in that chain can be monitored, identified, and cut off.

Fourth, its inability to solve the question of leadership—this is the most fundamental limit. Relying on open writing and dissemination alone, one cannot form a sustained, independent, organized ideological leadership. For leadership is not written into being by essays; it requires organization, it requires a material base, it requires long years of rooting oneself among the masses. Propaganda on an open platform is, at most, a "discursive presence," not a "presence of power."

So under the existing governance structure, the left's attempt to conduct red propaganda through open platforms and open training carries an evident fragility. It can, for a certain period, form a circle of influence; it can awaken a portion of the young; it can generate public opinion on particular topics—but it cannot break through the structural constraints on ideological leadership.

That the great power should ban a website is not because the website is strong, but because it knows that certain things, once openly disseminated, will—like seeds—fall into the soil, take root, and sprout. And what it means to do is to turn the soil over before the seed sprouts. As for the seeds it turns under, they do not vanish; they are only buried, for the moment, deeper. And history has never, for all the bans one after another, stopped its own dialectic.

"Support Utopia (Wuyou zhi Xiang)!"

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IV.  ESSAY — "The Harmless Left" and "The Dangerous Left"

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"The Harmless Left" and "The Dangerous Left"

By Xiaoxiao · September 13, 2026 · Renjing.net (archived)

In a tightly controlled arena of public opinion, the disappearance of a single website stirs almost no public ripple. Yet the question it raises cannot be ignored: in a country that professes Marxism as its guiding ideology, why should a website upholding a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist standpoint be shut down? And a sharper question still: in the present moment, should the left be a "harmless left," or a "dangerous left"?

I. What Is the "Harmless Left"?

The "harmless left" is a tacit understanding, an unspoken bargain.

As the essay "Starting from the Closing of Renjing.net" put it: you may sing red songs, but you may not ask whose blood dyed the "red" in those red songs red. You may commemorate Chairman Mao, but you may not press the question of what he was actually trying to do back then. You may proclaim "long live the laboring people," but you may not actually go and organize the laboring people. You may study dialectics, grumble in your circle of friends, sing "The Internationale" at the year-end party—but you may not move any of this onto an open platform, facing the public, forming a following, even training writers.

The "harmless left" is a permitted existence. Its harmlessness lies in this: it uses only symbols and does not contest their interpretation; it expresses only attitudes and does not form organization; it stays at the level of discourse and does not touch the material base. Otherwise, it is deemed "dangerous." And the boundary here is not defined by law but held in the grip of the relevant departments—at times purely by some subjective determination, betraying an intense ideological anxiety.

Take the closing of Renjing.net. It was not because it broke some specific law, but because it might have been doing three things (even if not actually doing them—merely as a possibility):

First, it tried to interpret "red." Not content to treat "red" as a decorative symbol, it tried to hold the classic texts up against reality, to restore "red" from a decorative instrument to a critical weapon. This touched the dragon's reverse scale. The logic of the governors runs: the symbols are mine, and so is the right to interpret them. You may use my symbols, but you may not redefine them.

Second, it tried to form a circle. In the age of algorithmic recommendation, Renjing.net, through content aggregation, formed a "left-wing cultural circle" of sharply defined standpoint. Within this circle, mutual identification steadily intensified; between circles, common ground dissolved. To the governors, this constitutes a latent threat: once people no longer form consensus through the mainstream media, but form identity within the interior of a circle, the cohering function of the mainstream ideology is challenged.

Third, it tried to train writers. Over two years and more of practice, Renjing.net cultivated a body of writers. The idea itself is full of ambition, but to conduct such training on an open platform is like practicing lock-picking outside the police station—however skilled the technique, it cannot survive being seen through at a glance. Open training means open recruitment, open organization, open dissemination—and every link in that chain can be monitored, identified, and cut off.

For power, the line between "harmless" and "dangerous" lies not in what you say, but in what you try to do. You may express an attitude, but you may not contest the right of interpretation; you may form a readership, but you may not form an organization; you may write essays, but you may not train the people who write them.

Once the line is crossed, the "harmless left" becomes the "dangerous left"—and is cleared away, as Renjing.net was.

III. Why Must the "Dangerous Left" Be Cleared Away?

Behind this lies a clear political logic.

First, platform dependency. Renjing.net's domain, its servers, its channels of dissemination were all attached to the existing governance system. It is like a tenant: when the landlord tells you to move, move you must, and you cannot even take the furniture with you. Left-wing propaganda on an open platform is, in essence, building a house on someone else's foundation; however handsome the house, pull the foundation and the whole thing collapses.

Second, the narrowness of the legal symbolic space. The governors permit you to use "red," but not to define "red." The moment you try to redefine it, the symbol's "cloak of legality" is withdrawn. The more Renjing.net stressed its own "orthodoxy," the more it insisted on "genuine Marxism-Leninism-Maoism," the more it made the mainstream discourse appear unorthodox, appear "not the real thing."

Third, the sensitivity to organization. Organization is the governors' most sensitive nerve. If even open propaganda can be cleared away in advance on the eve of a sensitive day, how much more so an act of organization in the true sense? The timing of Renjing.net's closing—September 8, the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Chairman Mao's death—is itself charged with the peculiar "precision" of the bureaucratic system. It was not banned on some random day; it was banned on a day carefully reckoned. The message: tomorrow is a sensitive day, so all of you settle down; today we shut one down first—kill the chicken to scare the monkeys.

From this it is plain that the banning of Renjing.net was no accident, but a necessity of the situation.

IV. Between "Harmless" and "Dangerous," Is There a Third Road?

Might the left-wing movement, then, turn toward "illegal struggle"? The answer is very nearly no.

Under conditions where digital surveillance, real-name registration, and big-data identification have reached a high maturity, the traditional model of "underground struggle"—secret societies, underground publications, linking-up and mobilization—has a narrower room for survival than in any period in history. It is not a question of "whether it is possible," but of "whether it can persist." A single WeChat group, one offline gathering, one abnormal flow of funds—any of these can become a node that is identified, cut off, and eliminated at a stroke.

More important still, "illegal struggle" lacks a social base. In the present social structure, left-wing thought can form a certain circle of influence among young netizens, but this influence is scattered, fragmented, and non-continuous; it has formed no organic tie with any social group of substantive strength, and has no trade union, peasant association, or other form of mass organization to lean on. Under such conditions, "illegal struggle" has neither a material base nor a mass base, still less a continuous replenishment of manpower.

And so the left-wing movement falls into a deeper predicament: it can neither win leadership through open channels, nor build an alternative structure through channels that are not open.

Under these conditions, only a few possible modes of existence remain:

The first: theoretical work in the study. Seeking neither dissemination nor influence, only to preserve and deepen critical thought. When the open space is compressed, one turns one's energies to the close reading of the classic texts, the sifting of theoretical questions, the summing-up of historical experience. Such work seems "useless," but it is the ground on which a tradition of thought may continue.

The second: the long immersion of the small circle. Seeking neither organization nor open mobilization, only to keep a tradition of thought alive within a particular group. Such a circle may exist as a reading group, an academic salon, an online discussion group—small in scale, but with an internal identification that steadily intensifies. Its significance lies not in "how many people it influences," but in "keeping this thought from dying."

The third: awaiting a structural crisis. This is not to "struggle" actively, but to see, when social contradictions sharpen, whether the existing critical resources can be reactivated. The banning itself also manufactures contradictions, also accumulates discontent, also prepares the conditions for a future reactivation.

V. Conclusion

The closing of Renjing.net is not the problem of a single website, but a symptom of the age. It poses several questions worth deep reflection.

The permitted existence of the "harmless left" comes at the price of surrendering the right of interpretation, surrendering organization, surrendering leadership. It can only use symbols, not define them; can only express attitudes, not form organized strength; can only remain at the level of discourse, not touch the ground of reality—reduced, like so many red websites at present, to a suspended spectacle and an appendage.

The "dangerous left" tries to go beyond this line—and what it faces is then not merely the "withdrawal of the legal symbolic space," but direct legal and administrative control. If even open propaganda can be cleared away in advance on the eve of a sensitive day, how much more so an act of organization in the true sense?

So the question is not "harmless or dangerous," but rather: after legal avenues have been shown to be fragile and illegal ones shown to be unworkable, how is the left-wing movement to avoid vanishing altogether?

For the left, the answer lies neither in finding some shortcut that is "both legal and effective," nor in fantasies of an "illegal struggle" that leaps past the present stage, but in acknowledging the predicament, accepting the limits, and then seeking a sustainable mode of existence—trading time for space, making ready "in thought and in talent" (Liu Jiming, A Brief Intellectual History: The Metamorphosis of an Era, 2001-2020). Such a mode of existence may be low-key, slow, and inconspicuous, but it is also the only way to let the seed of fire endure.

A front may be lost, a platform may be shut down—but so long as the seed of fire remains, there is the possibility of rekindling. The question is this: when a true "structural crisis" erupts, will the left still hold ideological mobilization and organizing capacity enough to meet the great social transformation of the tense to come?

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V.  POEMS

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To the Tune "Spring in the Garden of Qin"  (by Liu Jiming)

The sea of the web sinks into cloud; the red banner withers in the wind; the children of the cause wake from their dream in fright.

Grieving—the red flag rolls and unfurls, the first resolve unchanged; a lone lamp lights the wall, and the hot blood will not be stilled.

Every word a blade's edge, every sound a war-drum, once it called the dawn forth for the common folk.

Tonight, all silence: let the cold mist seal the casket, the lost wild goose mistake its shoal.

Who says the true road cannot be walked? Two years the vessel of mercy sailed—then all at once the lamp goes dark.

I lament: of Xiangjiang Review, but four issues remain; of Midstream, likewise only four.

Four issues, a song of grief; four issues, a final song—yet the fire passed hand to hand through a hundred generations will not consent to stop.

Where the gaze holds steady—see it array its ranks upon the clouds, and set out once more on the long march.

To the Tune "Prelude to the Water Melody"  (by Liu Jiming)

Brush and ink I offer to the common people; lifting the pen, I speak the dust-bound world.

Two years, the sparks of fire gathered together, our spirit pressing thin against the very sky.

I dared to set down the sorrows and joys of the people, to speak plainly of the world's cold and warmth, and sword in hand to stand upon the field of letters.

Every word held grief and gladness; a single phrase weighed heavy as a mountain.

The gale rises; the tower falls silent; the inkstone-pool goes cold.

In an instant the screen-world scatters, and volume and chapter turn to mist and cloud.

Do not lament that the front lies scattered; why fear the frost-wind's battering—the seed of fire was never spent.

While the heart holds an ambition high as the blue clouds, where is there any place I cannot speak?

(September 9, 2026)

To the Tune "The Moon over the West River": On the Closing of Renjing.net· 

By Sheshui Nongfu · September 9, 2026

When the human world is unjust, it cries out;

the harder the circumstance, the firmer it stands.

Forever it voiced the workers and farmers aloud,

its heart set on pressing forward, yielding to none.

Two years steeped in the red,

and a cohort of writers came forth.

Though dead, still living, they pass on the torch—

from this day, the seeds of fire spread on and on.

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VI.  A VETERAN SPEAKS

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Renjing.net Is Banned; Gu Zhenghua, a Hundred-Year-Old Veteran of the New Fourth Army, Speaks Out: You Cannot Cover the Mouths of the People!

Tian Qingqing (person in charge of Renjing.net) · September 19, 2026

This past Wednesday, together with red comrades from Wuhan, I went to visit Comrade Gu Zhenghua, a hundred-year-old veteran of the New Fourth Army. Though ailing and able only to rest in bed at home, the old man was overjoyed to see us all, and could still call out each of our names one by one. Spotting me in the crowd, he at once reached out his right hand, grasped mine warmly, and asked: "Has Renjing.net really been shut down?" When he learned that Renjing.net had been shut down on September 8, 2026, the old man was filled with indignation and said in a loud voice: "Renjing.net is a progressive website that holds firm to Marxism, and it is dearly loved by the broad masses. You cannot cover the mouths of the people—those who carry on like this will not last long!"

I conveyed to the old man the greetings of all the comrades of Renjing.net. Gu cannot hear, so I could only write it down for him to read; when he had finished reading, he said: "Whenever you need me to do something, tell me—I support it all. Let me sign my name, as a show of support!" And with that he solemnly signed his name.

Watching this, I was deeply moved. I thought of the last words of the late Wei Wei—"Continue the revolution, never surrender!"—and my faith in communism grew all the firmer.

Seeing how stirred Gu had become, the nurse, worried it might affect his health, came in to remind us that he had been thinking of our visit and had woken especially early that day. To let the old man rest sooner, we took our leave early. As we walked out of the room, Gu again shook hands with each of us in farewell.

Gu was born in 1926. As a primary-school pupil he resisted Japanese students and went off to join the New Fourth Army; with his unit he braved death again and again, defeated the Japanese, drove Old Chiang onto the island, and with his own hands helped liberate his own home city—Wuhan. After the founding of New China, Gu threw himself wholeheartedly into the revolutionary construction of Hubei. As Gu put it: "From my teens onward, my life, my studies, my interests, my everything—all of it has been bound up with the Communist Party." Most admirable of all, in his later years Gu joined the veteran revolutionary Comrade Li Erzhong, former governor of Hubei Province, in taking up the pen as a banner and the internet as a platform, vigorously carrying forward Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. Writing under the pen name "Chou Niu" (Ox), he produced powerful essays such as "The Black Brick Kilns—Where Does the Blackness Lie?", "One Photograph, One Era, the Great Contest of Two Classes," "The Long, Long Road of the 'Mass Line' and the Long, Long Road of the Masses' Petitions," "The Last Mile of the State-Owned Enterprise—Where Does It Go?", and "Reflections on '12.26'"—exposing the harsh persecution suffered by worker and peasant masses in enterprise restructuring, forced demolitions, and other struggles to defend their rights. For nearly fifty years he has cried out for the ordinary people and fought for the truth. On his hundredth birthday, this century-old revolutionary veteran called out to the red comrades who had come from across the country to "carry the revolution through to the end, never halting," urging everyone to defend Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and to go on "opposing imperialism and revisionism."

The banning of Renjing.net is no isolated incident. It is a long-premeditated "extermination" of believers in communism by the historical nihilists—a dictatorship of one class over another. But the laws of history tell us that a just cause will not stop advancing because it is banned. As the old man said: "You cannot cover the mouths of the people!"

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VII.  EDITOR'S NOTE

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Editor's Note — Revisiting One of Chairman Mao's Judgments: Revisionism and Fascist Dictatorship

After Renjing.net was banned, a reader, in the course of discussion, cited words of Chairman Mao's: that once revisionism takes power it is capitalism—the worst kind of capitalism—and it is fascism. Others asked whether these were Mao's exact words. It is worth establishing the sources, so that the judgment may stand on firmer ground.

This widely circulated saying, in its polished "quotation" form, is of somewhat uncertain word-for-word provenance. But the thought it expresses is Mao's own, line for line, and can be traced to formal documents.

First, on January 30, 1962, speaking at the Enlarged Central Work Conference—the "Seven Thousand Cadres Conference"—Mao said: "If a socialist economy is not built, what sort of situation would result? The country would become a revisionist state, would in effect become a bourgeois state, and the dictatorship of the proletariat would be transformed into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie—and one that is reactionary, of a fascist kind."

Second, in May 1963, in his "Comment on Seven Good Reports from Zhejiang Province Concerning Cadres Taking Part in Labor," Mao warned that should the enemy corrupt and infiltrate the ranks, "the Marxist-Leninist party would surely become a revisionist party, would become a fascist party, and the whole of China would change its color."

The chain, then—revisionism, dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, fascist dictatorship—was a judgment Mao himself set forth again and again; it is no later embellishment. Revisited today, it strikes one as all the more grave and clear-eyed: the encirclement and suppression of believers in communism by the historical nihilists, the dictatorship of one class over another, is precisely the confirmation of this judgment in our own time.

You cannot cover the mouths of the people. Truth does not lose its force because it is banned; in being banned, its edge only shows the sharper.

A Record Concerning Copies of the Black and White Anthology Sent into China

Vero Publishing

After the anthology Black and White: A Research Anthology came off the press, we sent twelve copies into mainland China.

Of the twelve, only one arrived—reaching Mr. Liu Jiming, and in an early edition that had not yet gone through our rounds of revision. Professor Kong Qingdong, who wrote the preface to this book, never received the volume that carries his own preface; the copies due to the editors of Renjing.net were all detained at customs, not one delivered.

We set this down plainly—not to protest, but to place it on record.

An anthology gathering more than a hundred and sixty essays by readers, scholars, the author, and the translator; a book Professor Kong Qingdong called "a demon-revealing mirror, a monumental milestone"—twelve copies sent in, eleven turned back. The very tightness of that net is itself an answer to this book: writing that truly had no power would not need to be guarded against so fiercely. What they held back was not paper, but the thing they feared.

Yet there is one thing they cannot hold back: this book now exists. It is registered in the international bibliographic record under the name of Vero Publishing; its digital edition passes from reader to reader; and the "people's verdict" it preserves has already entered the record of time. Customs may confiscate the physical copies sent in, but it cannot erase the book from the memory of the world.

A book passes quietly from hand to hand; a company has already set out.

The iron net will rust. The book will remain.