Jin Guangyao
On the first day of the Tiger New Year, he went to Cao Jing's house with his college classmate Gu Jiafu to give him a New Year's Greeting. Although he was very emaciated because of the treatment, he was still as energetic and happy as the previous times he had seen him. In the meantime, he said that when he went from Hong Kong to Taiwan to make news, he also promoted cross-strait exchanges. I said, when the weather gets warmer, I will bring a student to listen to you to talk, before you help others to do oral accounting, now I will help you do oral accounting. I say this to have time to chat with him during his treatment. He nodded and smiled as he listened. After chatting for more than an hour, we made an appointment to come back when the spring flowers bloomed when we said goodbye. Unexpectedly, the eleventh year of the great year, the year is not over, Cao Jingxing will travel far!
Jin Guangyao (left) and Cao Jingxing (right)
Cao Jingxing was diagnosed with stomach cancer in August 2020. On July 25 of that year, Cao Jingxing invited me to talk about my experience from farming in the tea forest farm to studying at the university at the Daxia Reading Club, and said that the lectures on reading in this way were a series, a total of 5 times. But shortly after the first one ended, the second book club was canceled. Later, hu Lizhong, a college classmate, said that there was news that Cao Jingxing was physically ill, and asked me if I knew, but I replied that it was unlikely, because I was giving lectures with him not long ago, and his circle of friends is still very active these days. Later, the news was confirmed at a gathering of farmers in the tea forest farm. I immediately asked Cao Jingxing on WeChat, and he replied very calmly that the treatment plan had been determined, and chemotherapy would be first and then surgery. At this time, the Department of History of Fudan University is holding an event for the 95th anniversary of the establishment of the Department, and it is necessary to invite outstanding members of the Department to give lectures, so I will invite Cao Jingxing. Before that, Cao Jingxing wanted to shoot a short video on the Fudan campus, but he could not enter the school because of the epidemic. So he hoped to put the lecture together with doing a short video and offered to schedule it before the operation. In this way, on the morning of October 23, Cao Jingxing and the filming team came to the Fudan campus. After meeting, he asked me to participate in the filming as a talker. I wasn't prepared for it, but I knew it was the way he worked, and even if he did it in advance, he would improvise on his own terms. That morning, walking around the campus and talking, talking about our college years, talking about our teachers, talking about Fudan school history, more than two hours ago, whether physically or mentally, he didn't look like a patient who had been in chemotherapy at all. He did not shy away from his illness, and when he saw his trademark silver hair suddenly thin, he smiled and frankly told the truth, as if he were talking about a thing in life that had passed. I was on the side, admiring his attitude towards illness and life.
My acquaintance with Cao Jingxing can be traced back to more than forty years ago when I went to the countryside in the Huangshan Tea Forest Farm in Anhui Province. He was a high school student in the class of 66 and came to Huangshan in August 1968. I am a junior high school student of the 70th class and came to Huangshan in November 1971. There are a group of 66 high school students in the tea forest farm, many of whom are from key middle schools, and Cao Jingxing is from Shixi Middle School. They had a very important influence on the ethos of the farm as a whole and on those of us who came later. Soon after arriving at the farm, I saw these high school students reading a number of books distributed internally, one of which was Mathieu's History of the French Revolution. I took it over, and a series of foreign names and place names were suddenly confused, and I couldn't read them. After entering college to study history, I realized that these high school students already wanted to understand the unprecedented revolution they had experienced but had not yet ended through the radical and tragic French Revolution. That's the gap between us and the Class of '66. But it was on the sidelines of these high school students that I, a person who had read the fifth grade of elementary school at the beginning of the "Cultural Revolution" and had not attended a complete middle school, read some books intermittently.
Cao Jingxing is picking tea leaves
Cao Jingxing in a tea forest farm with rural children
When I was in the tea forest farm, because I was not in a company, I had no contact with Cao Jingxing, but I had contact with his wife, Cai Jinlian, who was working in the political propaganda group of the ministry at the time, and thus knew Cao Jingxing, and knew that he was the most read among high school students. Because of his loud voice, everyone in the tea forest farm called him "horn", and I didn't want him to become the iconic "horn" of Phoenix Satellite TV later.
When the college entrance examination was resumed in 1977, Cao Jingxing and I both took the exam held in the cold winter season and passed the score line. For Cao Jingxing, this is an 11-year delay in the college entrance examination, as a key middle school senior student to pass the exam without suspense. For me, a 70th middle school student, in Shanghainese, it was the frontal bone that hit the ceiling. That year, because of the hasty time of the college entrance examination, the number of applicants was large, and the physical examination was qualified to participate after passing the score line. In the middle of January 1978, the tea forest farm specially sent a car to take us to Taiping County. At that time, I was young and strong, and I could rank in the top three among more than two hundred people in the company for heavy work, and I didn't think there would be any problems with the physical examination. As a result, blood pressure was measured, someone else once, I was asked to measure twice, both times 110/140, was identified as high blood pressure. When Filling out his medical history, Cao Jingxing truthfully wrote down that he had just suffered from acute hepatitis, but he had recovered. As a result, among the dozen or so people who went through the physical examination together, the two of us did not pass and were brushed off. That year's college entrance examination, the tea forest farm was assigned to the Anhui examination area, and the tea forest farm that belonged to Shanghai was particularly strict. Although the two of us are not sick, we have difficulties.
The second from the left in the back row is Cao Jingxing. The first left in the front row is Hong Kong journalist Jiang Xun, who recently died.
Fortunately, this was followed by the college entrance examination in the summer of 1978. This time, Cao Jingxing and Cai Jinlian were both husband and wife in the examination room. As a result, I was fortunate to be admitted to Fudan University with both of them. At the beginning of October 1978, when we left the tea forest farm, Cao Jingxing and his wife had been in the mountainous area of southern Anhui for ten years. Later, he often encountered people asking him what he had gained and lost in going to the countryside for ten years, and he replied: "Ten years of youth have passed, and it is not a simple addition and subtraction that can be concluded." But we can definitely say that the ten years of Huangshan Tea Forest Farm have given us more than the average person's ability to bear; with such an experience of 'bottom', no matter what unexpected changes and difficult situations we encounter later, it is not difficult to face and bear. He also bluntly commented on the "youth without regrets" that prevailed among the old intellectuals: There was no choice to go to the countryside in those years, so now there is no regret or no regret.
Jin Guangyao (fourth from left) and Cao Jingxing (sixth from left) are with Huangshan Lao Zhiqing
Cao Jingxing and Jin Guangyao returned to the tea forest farm
Cao Jingxing and I were both admitted to the History Department of Fudan University as our first choice, but our ideas were very different when we filled out the volunteer form. Cao Jingxing took the initiative to choose the history department, remembering that his score was more than 430 points (500 points in the five subjects), and there would be no problem in choosing the popular Chinese department and the journalism department at that time. But he believes that studying the liberal arts, no matter what kind of work you will do later, is the most basic of history. I only scored 375 points, and only the history subject scored a high score of 92. In 1978, unlike the previous year, I volunteered to fill in the Fudan History Department after the scores were announced.
After reporting to Fudan, we were divided into the same dormitory, Room 223 of Building 6. Becoming a housemate in the first year of college was a very fortunate thing for me, who had not completed secondary school, and Cao Jingxing's enthusiasm for learning and learning methods had a great impact on my path of study.
At the beginning of the enrollment, the teacher told us that the foundation of the history department is two general history courses: General History of China and General History of the World. When we study general history, we all read textbooks designated by teachers, such as Zhai Bozan's "Outline of Chinese History" and Guo Moruo's "Draft History of China". But these books also have Fan Wenlan's "General History of China", Cao Jingxing has read it in the tea forest farm, he set a goal for himself, to follow the general history class, starting from the "History", read all the first four histories, and then read the "Zizhi Tongjian". Such a reading volume is an impossible task for someone like me with a very poor foundation in ancient Chinese, not to mention the perseverance that is required. But Cao Jingxing did. At that time, the Zhonghua Bookstore's 20-volume set of "Zizhi Tongjian" had just been reprinted, and I remembered that it was a set of 20 yuan, and the small bookstore on the west side of the ground floor of the second teaching building had just been listed, and he did not hesitate to buy a set. Because his reading and buying books have become the vane among his classmates, there are 7 people in our dormitory, and 3 others have bought a set, and two fresh graduates have gone home to ask their parents for money to buy. At that time, the school's food expenses of 15 yuan a month were already very good, 20 yuan was a big expense, I looked at the yellow color cover of the dormitory, several sets of "General Notes", only the eyes were hungry. Later, he spent 3.05 yuan in the bookstore of Erjiao to buy a set of three volumes of "The End of the Chronicle of The Left Transmission", which slightly made up for his regrets, and also followed Cao Jingxing to read ancient books and learn ancient history.
Cao Jingxing also attaches great importance to English. In our class, the English foundation was uneven, and Cao Jingxing was one of the few who was exempted from the exam. But he didn't let up on learning English. He first finished four volumes of New Concept English and told us that this is a good set of teaching materials. As a result, several of us followed behind to learn this set of textbooks, and every time we learned the British humor in the textbook, everyone would communicate happily, sometimes joking with each other, and I can still remember Cao Jingxing's smile when he talked about British humor. Later, he directly read H.G. Wells's Compendium of World History, telling us that reading an English historical work from beginning to end increased vocabulary and reading speed, which was an effective way to learn professional English. So we all went to read the Compendium of World History, but the library didn't have so many copies. Cao Jingxing said that it is also useful to find a general history and read it from the beginning to the end. So I went to the library to borrow a book on the modern history of the world, and after reading it with the help of a dictionary, I found that my English reading ability had indeed improved significantly. Later, engaged in academic research and communication, English became an important tool for me, starting out in college.
At that time, the students liked to go to the library or classroom, but Cao Jingxing was used to being in the dormitory. At the desk closest to the door, reading a book with your head down and taking notes, classical music is played on a tape recorder shaped like a brick. Fu Nianzu, who lived in the same room, was also a veteran fan of classical music, and they often exchanged experiences of listening to music, talking with relish about the works and anecdotes of musicians such as Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Karajan, and Seiji Ozawa. I immersed myself in it from the beginning, from being dazed at first, to gradually falling in love with classical music. On the day of Cao Jingxing's death, farmer Friend Yang Daifan sent Mozart's "Requiem" with the words "Hymn of Life with Death". I immediately found the CD and played "Requiem" in the stereo, thinking that I liked Mozart's scenery to be heard in heaven.
Near the end of the semester of the second year of college, Cao Jingxing fell ill with acute hepatitis and was admitted to the school's isolation ward. But he did not relax in his studies, took the exam in the ward, the exam papers were disinfected and sent out, and the results were still as high as ever. After leaving the isolation ward, he and another classmate who had also suffered from hepatitis lived in a cabin on the east end of the second floor of Building 6. Because there were few people in that room, before the final exams, a few classmates and I would go there to review with him and make the final sprint before the exam.
In the last semester of college, there were fewer courses, and at that time, I didn't have to look for a job by myself, and I was waiting for an assignment. At this time, Cao Jingxing asked me to help do one thing. His father Cao Juren's "Ten Thousand Miles" to be published on the mainland, this is a book that Cao Juren reads thousands of books and travels thousands of miles, talks about Chinese history and culture through travelogues, and is also Cao Juren's first book published in the mainland after he went to Hong Kong. The book cites a large number of ancient poems, all written by Cao Juren from memory, originally as a newspaper column, written and sent, this time published in the mainland, need to be carefully checked, Cao Jingxing asked me if I would like to do this. As soon as I heard what I wanted, I agreed to it. When I was still in the Huangshan Tea Forest Farm, I knew that Cao Jingxing's father was Cao Juren, but in addition to knowing through the collection of Letters from Lu Xun that Cao Juren was a person who had correspondence with Lu Xun, my understanding was really limited. At that time, the books published by Hong Kong and Taiwan were not easy to obtain, so checking the poems gave me the opportunity to carefully read Cao Juren's articles. There are many wonderful comments on mountains, literature, and human feelings in the book, which may be read or applauded, or will smile. There were some good sentences, and when I returned to the dormitory, I rushed to share them with my classmates, which immediately attracted a lot of applause from the whole house. Twenty or thirty years later, when classmates meet, they will still mention the classic sentences in that book, and because they are getting older, they will experience it more deeply. After the publication of "Ten Thousand Miles", Cao Jingxing and his sister Cao Lei successively sorted out and published many works by Cao Juren, such as "Essays on the History of Chinese Academic Thought" and "My World", so that we and the younger generation can understand Cao Juren.
Jin Guangyao and Cao Jingxing participated in the 20th anniversary of graduation
After graduating from university, Cao Jingxing went to the Institute of World Economics of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and after working abroad for a year, I returned to dan history as a graduate student. When I was in graduate school, I went to the World Economic Institute several times, and Cao Jingxing always held a thick stack of foreign-language newspapers and read them, saying that these newspapers were almost no one but him, and his interest in the American economy at that time. I also went to his home on Nanjing West Road to borrow Hong Kong and Taiwan books on the history of the Republic of China, which Cao Juren had used during his lifetime, and some of the books did not even have the Hong Kong and Taiwan reading room of the Fudan University Library at that time. My master's thesis was on Chennault and the U.S. Air Force during the War of Resistance, and I consulted him before deciding on a topic.
Later, Cao Jingxing went to Hong Kong, entered the press industry to engage in journalism, and became widely known as a media person. On the night of the 9/11 incident, Fudan students stayed in a nearby hotel where they could watch Phoenix TV in order to watch Cao Jingxing's live broadcast. After meeting him afterwards, he said that he was in front of the camera that night in front of the suit and tie, but underneath was shorts, because he rushed from home to the TV station temporarily, there was no time to prepare, live broadcast for more than thirty hours, sleepy and fell to the ground to take a nap.
Cao Jing acted as the host of the book launch of Jin Yinuo (second from left), the daughter of Jin Guangyao
Cao Jingxing and Jin Yinuo
After Cao Jingxing's death, many people talked about the TV current affairs commentary he pioneered, which will indeed go down in the annals of Chinese television. But as a historian, I pay more attention to and value the oral history programs he participated in on Phoenix TV. These oral historical records preserve many major events in China's modern and contemporary history, such as Gu Shunzhang's daughter Gu Liqun, whom he interviewed, and Wu Jianhua, political commissar of Unit 8341, who carried out the task of arresting the Gang of Four. Cao Jingxing has said many times that in several oral interviews, his immediate questioning has revealed many precious historical details, and he is very proud of this. This stems from his sensitivity to journalism and his quality in history. Because some of the subject matter was too sensitive, it could not be broadcast after recording, and he was always full of regrets when talking about it, but he would say that fortunately, the recorded oral interviews were preserved.
After leaving Phoenix TV, Cao Jingxing went to teach at the School of Journalism at Tsinghua University, but he felt that he still had the energy to do something else. So, I came to my alma mater to encourage me to do oral history together. Before that, he knew that I had dictated, and the interviewe was his uncle Cao Yi. Cao Yi was the sixth term of the Whampoa Military Academy, and led a car regiment on an expedition to India and Burma during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. At the beginning of 2008, we established the Oral History Research Center at Fudan University, where he served as the director of the academic committee of the center. The first project of the Oral History Center is to do oral history commemorating the 30th anniversary of reform and opening up. In order to train college students to participate in oral history, Cao Jingxing came to his matriarchal department to give a special lecture on "I and Oral History". Under his auspices, we found 10 representative figures who had a major impact in the 30 years of Shanghai's reform and opening up, and recorded the social changes that took place in Shanghai after the reform and opening up through their oral accounts, including the "testing the waters" co-production contract in Jiading County, the publication of the novel "Scars", the staging of the drama "In the Silent Place", the launch of Baosteel, the return of Shanghai Zhiqing to the city, the resumption of Xinmin Evening News, the autonomy of Shanghai's college entrance examination, the 1988 Shanghai hepatitis A pandemic, the publication of the "Huang Fuping" article, and the "Phoenix Nirvana" of shanghai textile industry. Involving economic, social, cultural, educational, health, news and other fields, the hepatitis A pandemic was narrated by the former vice mayor Xie Lijuan, revealing many precious historical details. Together, these oral accounts became Cao Jingxing's "Personal Experience: 30 Years of Shanghai's Reform and Opening Up", which was published by Shanghai Dictionary Publishing House. Cao Jingxing was very happy to return to his mother's oral history this time. As a journalist who studied history, in his case, news and history are integrated.
Cao Jingxing participated in the Zhiqing activities in Heihe in 2009
In the eyes of many people, Cao Jingxing is a veteran media person. But it seems to me that he is first and foremost a reader. Since he was a child, he has been a book lover, and with a children's library reading card, he has turned over the books in the library. Later, when I went to the countryside in Huangshan, I saw the needle in the seam to find a book to read, and when I entered Fudan University, I could say that I couldn't release the volume, and until the last stage of my life, I still had a strong desire for knowledge. He inherited the Chinese reader's sentiment of "caring about family affairs, state affairs, and everything in the world", not only reading books on paper, but also reading the big book of society. At this point, he was exactly the same as his father Cao Juren, reading thousands of books and traveling thousands of miles. Both father and son were readers, Cao Juren became a war correspondent because of the War of Resistance, and Cao Jingxing also entered the media because of fate. Because he has the background of a reader, he is full of poetry books, and he has a unique book atmosphere on the TV screen.
Editor-in-Charge: Shanshan Peng
Proofreader: Liu Wei