Two open letters to the protagonist "Little A" and the author Wu Qinying
(Author's note: The date of writing of this article is 34 years ago, and the corresponding event is: When a female graduate student in Shanghai was investigating in the countryside, she was lured to a certain place by a Henan woman who only had a Chinese in the countryside, and took "a partnership to resell cultural relics, which can be divided into profits of 200 yuan" as bait, and was lured to a certain place, bought in the peasant palace as a wife, and then took 70 days to be rescued.
From the wording of this article and its language, it can be seen that the author's thinking at that time was obviously greatly influenced by brother Bump's article "Dialogue with Li Zehou", and there were many biases in itself. The author has since been displaced, the early manuscripts are lost, and the reason why this article has survived to this day is thanks to the handwriting of a friend, who transferred his saved manuscripts to the author in recent years, and was unexpectedly reunited with the old text.
Special thanks! In order to maintain the original appearance, do not change a word, as another interpretation of the recent "Chain Girl Incident" in Xuzhou. Author2022-02-17)
To "Little A"
You were called "Little A" by reporter Wu Qinying, and I can only call you "Little A", I'm sorry, it was me, I would protest - you must call me by my name.
But Wu Qinying is completely kind, and she has successfully saved your reputation and saved face for you. You will be grateful to her. She put you out of the limelight and went to the front pages of several media outlets. You are not the first and will never be the last of the people who have been trafficked in China, so why do you only have to cause a sensation and enjoy the popularity of the stars? The only reason is that you are a graduate student, an intellectual, a cultural person whom Wu Qinying calls. In other words, you, a graduate student of culture, should have sold at a high price, but who knows, you were bought and sold at a low price by a group of peasants who did not know the goods, and the price did not reflect the value, which triggered social protests. You have hurt all of our self-esteem and other hearts as "products of the same kind." You've lost face to us, and we can't stand it.
Yes, you can be deceived, it is not surprising, in life, who dares to say that they have never been deceived and played? The strange thing is that after you found out that you were being trafficked, you couldn't do anything about it! You have a high IQ, but why can't you think of a way out? Wu Qinying believes that this is a failure of education, a fiasco of traditional school education.
But I think it's a misunderstanding.
It's not that you're incompetent enough to think of a way out, it's that you need to choose some suitable way to get out. Get out of the second, fit first. Wu Qinying was puzzled by your way of thinking as a graduate student: Why didn't you think of relying on organizations, governments, and law? And what about when you think of death, God, and corn growing tall? In fact, you don't want to escape at all, you must have thought about it more than once, just give this native farmer a daughter-in-law in this life - when you can't ask for death.
Ordinary rural women who have been abducted can be rescued by the organization and the law, and you cannot. Because you're a graduate student. So you can only escape in secret, people don't know, ghosts don't know. This is the key, because only in this way can we save face, reputation and self-esteem, and then we can return to Shanghai to continue to be an intellectual. It's too much to say you don't want to escape at all, you always want to escape, but you end up still not moving.
Fleeing should be your instinctive reaction, but this instinct of yours is tightly blocked and suppressed by the accumulation of culture and by the "rigid layer of reason". The instinct and cultural accumulation of escape is sure to clash fiercely in the depths of your subconscious, and the victory or defeat is undecided. This "battle of the souls" is externalized into your negative behavior —pushing the escape again and again, delaying the action.
Before the corn grows taller, before you find a plan to escape from Gu Quanzi, you will definitely give up the possible escape opportunity thousands of times. Isn't that also the case? When the village cadres were suspicious and took the initiative to come to you to talk to you and want to find out the truth, you deliberately avoided it, and you were not powerless to escape, but deliberately did not flee. You cannot prove "the failure of education", you can only prove "the success of education".
Culture gives you a personality, a personality that is opposed to and in conflict with life, and you would rather give up freedom or even life to preserve culture, education, and cultural personality. For this reason, during your humiliation, you strictly concealed your true identity, preferring to be "Little A", as if since then, the peasants of Gongjiazhuang had insulted only one woman and not the graduate student, as if they could insult life and not culture. After being rescued, you always stressed that they treated you as a woman and not as a graduate student! Let people know that you have successfully defended the culture with your life.
Your tragedy is not the lack of education, but the excess of education, and from you people should see the pain of culture, the repression, destruction, imprisonment, destruction, strangulation and trampling of culture on people's sensual life and living humanity! How to turn a living person, a boiling individual of life, into a "non-human" of culture and ideas, how to make people give up freedom and give up life for the sake of cultural personality. Abandon people!
Chinese has always been ugly, and Chinese intellectuals, especially ugly, are the reason why intellectuals are the enjoyers of culture and the biggest carrier of traditional culture, and every hair bears infinite responsibility to traditional culture. Relative to you, rural women with little education, as soon as they find out that they have been trafficked, immediately rebel, act immediately, and be 100% saved at the first chance. They have only life and no burden of culture. Their escape will lose nothing but gain freedom and social sympathy, they will not worry about humiliating the culture, losing face to all intellectuals, unable to account for the intellectuals, and not having to worry about the inability to repair the self-esteem that has been broken or tilted after escaping.
In this way, culture makes you abandon people and choose people who are not human. He gave up his freedom and chose not to run away. Of course, once the corn grows taller, you will also try to escape, but only if the culture is safe and unspoiled. This way you will preserve the culture because of your own prudence. Culture doesn't know it's ever been hurt. The farmers of Gongjiazhuang did not know that they had hurt the culture. You never tell them that you represent culture.
Who's to say it's a failure of education?
Education has been a resounding success for you.
You cried when you were finally saved. Maybe a few of these tears flowed for the culture - paying the price of 70 days of sex slavery, still letting the traditional culture be destroyed, the face of the culture finally not saved, the self-esteem and identity finally not saved, or the ugly for all intellectuals! You have been suffering for more than 70 days, and you still can't save the culture from embarrassment, which may be the subtext of your string of tears.
I wish I had misunderstood you...
To Wu Qinying
You think that "college students and graduate students should be committed to their studies, but the business trend that blows into the campus has inflated the commodity consciousness of some students, resulting in psychological disorders, the balance of value tilted, and the fragile nerves collapsed." Money, almost invariably, has become a direct inducement for cultural people to be deceived. "I dare not say that your statement is too flippant and irresponsible, but I am sure that you lack analysis.
There is no doubt that Little A is among the "some students". They "tilt the scales of value", on one side is money, on the other side what, you do not say, but according to the context, it should include "dedication to school". You couldn't be clearer – you shouldn't turn to money. If so, being deceived is self-inflicted, and you deserve it! I don't know if you dare to admit that you actually think so in your heart? Of course, you are heartbroken by this phenomenon of "falling to money".
Why did Little A and his "students" "fall for money"?
Why are at least a few hundred million out of a billion people frantically "falling for money"?
If I associate money with the awakening and liberation of man himself and the independence and integrity of his personality, perhaps it will not confuse many people and make you "mentally disturbed". In traditional cultures, money has never been associated only with sin, and has always been the object of hatred and curse. "Gentlemen are inherently poor", how does this sound funny that Li Lianying despises Ximen Qing's personal life style. If there are any people in the world who hate money the most, it can only be Chinese intellectuals. In the habitual hatred that has been cultivated over thousands of years, you will naturally find no simple and common sense fact that a person can become an independent person only if he has money, private property in the sense of production relations or economics. Private property is the material premise for man to move from vassalage to independence.
Since May Fourth, more than half a century has passed, at least among contemporary youth, self-consciousness, life consciousness, and modern consciousness have awakened and matured, but why do they only get a stronger sense of repression or distortion, a stronger sense of instrumentality, enslavement, or absurdity? The root cause is the lack of freely disposed private property. The so-called "self-reliance" is nothing more than the recognition and acceptance of instrumentalized and enslaved status. From "inhuman" to human, from instrumental to self, the last barrier that needs to be broken, the real obstacle, is money! economy! private property! In the bourgeois constitution, the sanctity of private property lies in the sanctity of the self and the individual. Understanding this, we can at least understand the deep philosophical meaning of the current economic reform on the mainland, understand the cultural and philosophical value of the money frenzy that has swept the whole country, and understand why the "commodity consciousness and money consciousness of some students" will expand and be irreversible. Through the fog of money, people pursue people, themselves, and infinite spaces outside the law.
Whoever owns discretionary private property is more likely to own and enjoy free space outside the law, and the vast and boundless web of power, from the chairman of the ruling party to the head of the neighborhood committee, will not work for him; he can transcend the barriers, and his social relations can be reduced to the word "friend." No morality, ethics, customs, politics, culture, religion, or territory can regulate, constrain, restrict, or regulate his behavior and thinking, except by law. He is only a good citizen before the law, and besides he is the self, the man, and by no means a symbol, an idea, a tool or a vassal, a means, a slave. It can even be said that in the "dehumanized" state of existence, there is no "life value" or "life meaning" to speak of, nor career or study. Before people do not go to the self, to the freedom, the success of career or academic success is only the success of the slave! "Commitment to school" is nothing but a kind of self-anesthesia and self-deception, an instrumental reinforcement and a slavery deepening! The greatest ugliness, or greatest tragedy, of Chinese intellectuals is the conscious and voluntary willingness to admit and accept the instrumentalized status, the desire to be enslaved or to enjoy the sense of loss and loneliness that cannot be used as a tool, that is, the "pain of not being able to help".
If there is anything wrong with "some students", it is that they dare not pursue money and do not pursue money; if there is anything worth blaming, then the blame is the incompetence exposed in the pursuit of money! Little A's fault is in the lack of ability to get the 200 yuan, not in the desire for the 200 yuan. The reason why money "almost invariably becomes the direct inducement of cultural people to be deceived" is precisely to refute the general incompetence of intellectuals, and it has nothing more to prove!
China's economic changes so far, the remarkable achievements are still thousands of troops in the rise of urban and rural self-employed people, they are generally not college students and graduate students are not cultural people, a large amount of money in their pockets has become a "crazy trapped beast", triggered the "huge wealth phobia" and "huge wealth chorea", there have been many dazzling "strange actions", then the intervention and participation of cultural people will lead to the change of this situation. The transition from "dedication to study" to "expansion of commodity consciousness" is a major opportunity for the fate of Chinese intellectuals, and their participation and intervention in economic activities will lead this economic change to a deeper and broader social change. It is they who will associate private property with the emancipation of man, money with personality independently, and man from "non-man" to self, individual, and person himself, to emotional life, just as a Soviet journalist described China's reform - "turning man into man."
It is the intellectual group that is most deeply hurt by traditional culture and almost terminally ill, and it is precisely because of the rapid rise of the self-employed people that they are confused in the face of money and psychologically disturbed by the decline of traditional culture because of their "habitual hatred" for money, and they are overwhelmed or even afraid of the end of the day - the balance of value has fallen, what can I do in the future?
Chinese intellectuals, what will you choose?
Written on September 25, 1988 in Basuo Port, Hainan