The Writer Who Once Sought Room for Reform

 Within the System Has Left the Stage for Good

By Yu Si · Source: "The Long March Has Its Heirs" (public account) · August 10, 2026

In his place stands an activist left-wing intellectual who wears "being suppressed" as a badge of the spirit and takes "writing is struggle" as his creed. He no longer waits for dialogue; he only records—recording the history and the reality as he sees them, diagnosing the affliction as he sees it, summoning the future as he sees it.

From the latter half of 2023, the noted writer Liu Jiming began composing a series of short pieces on Weibo, which, gathered into a whole, he titled Random Thoughts. The title speaks directly to Ba Jin's work of the same name. In "Random Thoughts (16)" he made the difference between the two plain: Ba Jin told the truth from the standpoint of the "intellectual elite"; he tells the truth from the standpoint of the "laboring people," and truths told from different standpoints are "essentially different." This is not homage but the drawing of a line: my Random Thoughts stands opposite yours.

The narrative frame of Random Thoughts carries an intense consistency: the maladies of the great power are not local, not isolated cases, but systemic. Liu Jiming's comment on the Xu Jiayin affair is representative. He does not see it as a case of corruption or a regulatory loophole, but diagnoses it as "the product of a deviation in political line"—the structural collusion of capital and power, the inevitable result of reform straying from the socialist essence.

In "Random Thoughts (21)" he says outright that "to hoist the socialist lantern while walking the capitalist road was something the chief architect designed long ago," and that the line of forty-odd years has been "of one continuous piece." His diagnosis of the cultural sphere is no less sharp. On Mo Yan's inscription at the Liaoshen Campaign Memorial Hall—"Cannon-fire filling the heavens, all for a change of dynasty; corpses strewn across the field, every one a farmer's son"—he does not deny the view in the lines, but presses the question further: if a revolution ends up as "merely a change of dynasty," if exploitation and oppression have not vanished but revived under another name, then "does such a revolution still possess that self-evident sanctity and progressive significance?"

In "Random Thoughts (16)," Liu Jiming recalls his own intellectual course: born in the 1960s, he lived through the Cultural Revolution as a boy, and came of age amid the Western democratic currents of the 1980s. In the end he concluded that China's way out lies neither in Confucian nationalism nor in capitalist democracy, but in the people's democracy that Chairman Mao proposed in Yan'an—"let everyone rise to supervise the government." Then he writes: "Such a great democracy was once put into practice in China, but it failed (opposing and guarding against revisionism)." Yet he adds at once that the failure "cannot serve as grounds for total negation and stigmatization." "Everything depends on how we sum up the experience of our forebears and inherit their legacy. For a communist, what most deserves to be inherited is the legacy of Mao Zedong—not that of Sun Yat-sen or Confucius."

This passage lays bare the spiritual lineage of Random Thoughts: the one who holds it defines himself as the steadfast "heir" of the revolutionary legacy, and defines the mainstream practice of forty-odd years as a "betrayal." It is a fundamental transposition. The writing of Random Thoughts is itself an encounter-battle with the mainstream.

Liu Jiming has been silenced, his posts deleted, his accounts banned—and none of this has stilled him; on the contrary, he has folded it into the narrative of Random Thoughts, making it the very fuel of his stance. "The attacks and slanders of the rightists are a kind of honor conferred in reverse." This line, written in Random Thoughts, forms a complete logical loop with what he would later relay—"a punishment is a still greater medal": the more you suppress me, the more it proves I have threatened you; the more I am suppressed, the more it proves I stand on the side of truth.

He quotes Mao Zedong: "Truth is often in the hands of the few." Here, suppression is converted into honor, marginalization into steadfastness.

This is not the Ah Q method of moral victory, but a closed circuit of value—he refuses to accept the rules of winning and losing as the other side defines them. So long as one community of left-wing readers affirms this transposition, the circuit holds. Its validity does not depend on outside recognition, only on inner resonance. Liu Jiming's Random Thoughts has created a rare, systematic dissident narrative borne in the Weibo form; it has honed the knife of class analysis to a finer edge, cutting open many social wounds that the mainstream, and even the broad left, would rather not touch, and offering those who are "insulted and injured" in reality a complete framework of explanation—your plight is not that you are not good enough; it is that the system itself has gone wrong. When the critique of Random Thoughts travels to its farthest point, it points toward "returning to the Yan'an tradition" and "rebuilding people's democracy"—but these read more as declarations than as programs. It halts at diagnosis, leaving the "what is to be done" to the future—or to the next work. Random Thoughts is a book written standing on a fault line. Its author will not grant that "pluralism" is a virtue, will not grant that compromise is wisdom, will not grant that standing in the middle is clearer-eyed than standing on one side. He chooses to stand on one side: to stand for the proletariat, to speak for the laboring people, and to declare that the people on the other side have betrayed.

To readers who share his view, this is the book of a thinker "speaking from the side of the people"; to those who do not, it is a manifesto in which standpoint precedes fact. Both judgments are true, depending on where you stand. And the practice of Random Thoughts—and of Liu Jiming over the past decade—shows at least this much: the writer who once sought room for reform within the system has left the stage for good. In his place stands an activist left-wing intellectual who wears "being suppressed" as a badge of the spirit and takes "writing is struggle" as his creed. He no longer waits for dialogue; he only records—recording the history and the reality as he sees them, diagnosing the affliction as he sees it, summoning the future as he sees it. His followers may be few and his detractors many, yet he has resolutely set out on the road—like Zhang Muzhi in Let the Bullets Fly: a streak of setting sun, a lone rider galloping, solitary, and yet possessed of a beauty that stands apart from the world.

"Support Utopia (Wuyou zhi Xiang)!"

A few notes:

• 《随想录》 / Random Thoughts — Ba Jin's late memoir-essays (随想录) are conventionally translated Random Thoughts, so I kept that, which preserves the deliberate echo Liu is picking a fight with.

• 许家印 / Xu Jiayin — the Evergrande founder; I left the name in pinyin. Say the word if you'd like a three-word gloss ("the Evergrande founder") for English readers.

• "打社灯走资路" — a compressed, punning line (raising the socialist "lantern"/banner while walking the capitalist road). I rendered it as "hoist the socialist lantern while walking the capitalist road"; a plainer option is "flying the socialist flag while taking the capitalist road."

• 总设计师 / "the chief architect" — the standard epithet for Deng Xiaoping. Kept as the epithet, as the original does; I can add "[Deng Xiaoping]" in brackets if you want it explicit.

• 《让子弹飞》/ Let the Bullets Fly and 张牧之 / Zhang Muzhi — Jiang Wen's 2010 film and its protagonist; kept the standard English title and the character's pinyin name.

• 精神胜利法 / "the Ah Q method of moral victory" — Lu Xun's term for self-consoling delusion; I glossed it inline so English readers catch the barb (the author is denying Liu is doing this).

• 乌有之乡 / Utopia — kept as before, consistent with the rest of the dossier.

This one is a standalone essay (an outside profile of Liu, not part of the Renjing.net closure). Want it kept separate, or added to the dossier as an appendix-style profile? It doesn't belong in the seven-part sequence thematically, so my instinct is to keep it on its own—but I'll place it wherever you prefer.