In the fifth issue of China Youth in 1980, a screenshot of the letter signed "Pan Xiao" was published
On August 23, 2017, Wei Xiang reported to Tsinghua University Photo/Reporter Hao Yi Of this newspaper
The broad masses of young people must shoulder the historical mission, strengthen their confidence in advancing, set great aspirations, be wise and virtuous, become great talents, and shoulder great responsibilities, strive to become new people of the times who are worthy of the heavy responsibility of national rejuvenation, and let the youth bloom in their unremitting struggle for the motherland, the nation, the people, and mankind.
——Xi Jinping's speech during his inspection at Tsinghua University on April 19, 2021
The vast number of young people throughout the country must bear in mind the party's teachings, be determined to rejuvenate the nation, live up to Shaohua, live up to the times, and live up to the people, run the track of youth, and strive to achieve the best results of contemporary youth!
——On April 25, 2022, Xi Jinping delivered a speech at a discussion between teachers and students of Chinese Min University
The broad masses of young people must strive to be new people of the times who are worthy of the heavy responsibility of national rejuvenation, and forge ahead with vigor and courage in the torrent of the era of realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
——On April 25, 2022, Xi Jinping delivered a speech at a discussion between teachers and students of Chinese Min University
From Pan Xiao's narrow life path to Wei Xiang's enough faith
A red boat sails in the long river of history; the spark of stars condenses into a beam of light that illuminates the darkness. The Communist Youth League, founded by the Communist Party of China, has gone through a journey of 100 years. These 100 years are the 100 years in which Chinese youth have continued to struggle and march forward triumphantly from generation to generation, and 100 years in which Chinese youth have used their youthful selves to create a youthful China and a youthful nation. From the sound of a hundred years of empty valleys, we heard the magnificent stage of the new democratic revolution and the cry of the "May Fourth" movement; we saw the heroic feelings of the first youth commando in the country sweating like rain in the stage of socialist revolution and construction in full swing; we felt the "breakthrough and trial" nurtured by young students in the "challenge cup" in the tide of reform and opening up; we were even more carried by the innovative mechanisms of "Youth Innovation Beijing" and "Unveiling the Commander-in-Chief" to bring the train galloping forward in the new era.
How can the ship of youth avoid drifting like a rudderless boat? At the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, General Secretary Xi Jinping gave the answer that seemed to be a candle: that is, young people should "aim high and inspire the potential to forge ahead." A "Zhi" character fulfills the young people's thinking about ideals and their interpretation of responsibilities. If we use the former as the meridian and the latter as the weft, allow us to focus the coordinates of history on two young people who are 37 years apart. Although they are in different historical conditions, they are all struggling to find a new starting point in their life journey; although their experiences are not the same, they have experienced great suffering and even the tribulations of life, and finally gained a completely different sense of life. From their life meridians, they can touch the interaction between youth and the times, and they can feel the deep feelings of youth and their homeland.
A collision of ideas across the ages
In May 1980, a long letter signed "Pan Xiao" was published in the magazine China Youth. The letter uses heavy, gloomy, depressed, sincere, and indignant strokes to write about the pain and trauma of life, and as soon as it is published, it triggers a nationwide discussion on the concept of life.
The letter tells the story of the author Pan Xiao, who was originally full of beautiful visions for life (it was later proved that "Pan Xiao" was a combination of the names of two young people at that time), who was hit by the "ugly and vicious face of life", but still insisted on "seeking the answer to the meaning of life" and the confusion in the process of seeking. The letter for the first time put forward the ethical proposition of "subjectivity for oneself, objective for others", and issued an exclamation of "the road of life, how to go narrower and narrower".
The discussion sparked unprecedented heat, "China Youth" was released on May 1, began to receive letters from readers to participate in the discussion on the 14th, rose to 100 on the 17th, exceeded 1,000 on the 27th, and by June 9, more than 20,000 discussion drafts were received in less than a month.
This discussion marked young people's independent thinking about life. A commentator in the People's Daily praised the discussion for "bringing out the things that are deep in the minds of young people and engaging in really comradely discussions, which is deeply moving," and Xinhua News Agency affirmed that "only by understanding young people can we help young people, and only by seeking truth from facts can we solve problems." Of course, there are also a large number of voices that elevate Pan Xiao's letter to a "new trend in the class struggle", and some people even write letters insulting the editorial department as an "arsonist".
Let's push the lens of history back to the cross-century year of 2017 - Wei Xiang, an 18-year-old young man from Dingxi, Gansu Province, who suffered from a double lower limb disability and lost his father since childhood, is about to knock on the door of Tsinghua University with an excellent score of 648 points in the college entrance examination. However, when communicating with the Tsinghua Gansu Admissions Team, due to the inability to fully take care of one's own life and the uncertainty of enrollment, Wei Xiang took the initiative to send a letter to the Tsinghua Recruitment Office, telling about his experience of being loved by his mother for more than ten years, and "earnestly hoping that Tsinghua University can help my mother and son solve a bad stay, only for my mother and son to stay." The Tsinghua Recruitment Office immediately replied to him publicly, saying that it would properly solve his worries, and encouraged him at the end of the letter: "We would like to say to the students who are thorny on the road to study: Life is really hard, but please believe enough!" This true inspirational story, at that time, once reported by Beijing Youth Daily and its public number "Education Roundtable", immediately brought thousands of netizens to tears, and the number of hits in less than two days reached more than 8.7 million, and the discussion of more than 20,000 netizens in the comment area was touching - some praised Tsinghua's teacher morality as "making people tear up", and at the same time more moved by "the perseverance of this student and his mother"; some could not help but cry after reading this article, paying tribute to Wei Xiang, who is constantly improving himself! Hats off to Wei Xiang's mother! Some said, "Seeing the crying, I believe there are many enterprises that can fund Wei Xiang to complete his studies"; some say that "after reading two lines of tears, it gives people a kind of spiritual strength that bursts out of their hearts"...
If the thinking of ideals is the spiritual nirvana of young people, then the great discussion of opening the heart is always an effective way for young people to educate themselves - whether it is the great discussion of "practice is the only criterion for testing truth" and "how to contribute youth to a bright China", or the discussion triggered by inspirational young people like Wei Xiang in the new era, although the carrier is different across the times, it is "immersive", and the essence of its communication, the collision of ideas, and the original driving force for the upward development of the times have never changed.
"Pan Xiao's" "Three Sufferings" and Wei Xiang's "Three Blessings"
If we look at "Pan Xiao" and "Wei Xiang" today, standing on the coordinate system of history, we can see the characteristics of different eras brought by the two young people who love to think, that is, the "three sufferings" of "Pan Xiao" and the "three blessings" of Wei Xiang.
Pan Xiao's first suffering is "the pain of hitting a wall." In order to seek the meaning of life, he reads books, but always from concept to concept, can not find a response to reality outside the book; he asks others, but always feels empty, feels that the colleagues around him cover everything up with practical interests.
Pan Xiao's second suffering is the "suffering of retreat." He often thinks but can't, so he "hides in a small building to form a unity", uses concepts to solve concepts, uses books to solve reality, and then issues a soul torture question of "do you believe in books or eyes".
Pan Xiao's third suffering is the "pain of direction." After the trauma of a special historical period, on the eve of an era when ideological imprisonment has not yet been completely broken, and truth-seeking and pragmatism have not yet become the norm, Pan Xiao's bitter thinking about the confusion of life is in essence a projection of the bitterness of an era on a young individual. His "pain of direction" carries a deep imprint of the times.
However, Wei Xiang in the new era correspondingly has "three blessings". The first is the "blessing of integration". A sports event in which disabled people seem to be unable to participate, Wei Xiang has become a "queue commander" sitting in a wheelchair waving the flag, "we don't want him to feel that he is different from others", the class teacher Wei Yajun's words in an interview with Beiqing Daily vividly explained the connotation of "equality" in the sense of pedagogy - that is, the integration of disabilities and health, love like water, and the melting of barriers.
The second is the "blessing of reality." Wei Xiang's youth does not seem to have any earth-shattering "big things" - his face is stuck on his mother's back and braves the rain to go to class; he solves a physical problem to share with his classmates; he repeatedly presses the button at the head of the bed to feel the song "Grateful Heart"... These things are only "small" and more "real". "Those who get big can be small at the same time", Wei Xiang never retreated, on the road to study and forge ahead, what he grasped every day was real love, real progress, and real accumulation.
The third is the "blessing of gratitude." It is a "nurturing grace" for a single mother to send her son Wei Xiang to and from school for 12 years; it is a kind of "grace of knowledge" for a classmate to silently replace Wei Xiang's bench with a back chair; a homeroom teacher who is good at discovering and giving play to Wei Xiang's strengths is a kind of "bole grace"... When the seed of gratitude gradually sprouts in the heart, upward goodness is the direction of his growth.
What does the reflections of the two young men on the times illustrate?
Standing on the timeline of history, looking back at Pan Xiao and Wei Xiang, two individuals walking alone in their respective eras, and the portraits of the times they have sketched through their own thinking and practice are very different.
The trajectory of life cannot transcend the conditions of the times. Pan Xiao did not go to college, but she longed for the luster of knowledge; she had no experience, but she especially wanted to have a mature life. Wei Xiang, on the other hand, although born in the land of the bitter jia world, knocked on the door of Tsinghua through his own unremitting efforts; he was not good at words, but in the educational atmosphere of "making people believe enough", he "lived to be respected and worshipped". Historical materialism tells us that everyone must plan their lives and create history under the conditions of their own times. Youth is the most sensitive barometer of the era, and this "sensitivity" is manifested in Pan Xiao,that is, his question is essentially that young people get out of the rigid superstition of thought and make their own independent thinking about life. As the Party Central Committee stressed in its congratulatory message to the Eleventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1982, "Under the new historical conditions ... More than ever, our Party and the Country need the consciousness and struggle of young people." However, what is manifested in Wei Xiang is the exemplary power of the new era with suffering and tenacity, and with great love and ordinary life practice.
The trajectory of life cannot transcend the stage of the development of the times. The great discussion on the concept of life triggered by Pan Xiao has been likened to the "spiritual first love" of an entire generation of Chinese youth. First love may be sincere, but it is often childish; first love may be urgent, but it is often short-lived. That special stage of the times made Pan Xiao fall into the interrogation of the "narrow" and "wide" road of life and could not extricate himself; in the new era, what Wei Xiang did was to really "crawl and roll in the struggle, experience the cold and warm of the world, the people's sorrows, and the contradictions of reality, and find the true meaning of life, the value of life, and the direction of the cause" (Xi Jinping: Speech at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement).
The trajectory of life cannot surpass the guidance of the times to young people. Pan Xiao's confusion is essentially the confusion of the times, and on the eve before the fog of ideological imprisonment has not yet dissipated, the young people who are long in thinking inevitably have a "vacuum" of thought; however, for Wei Xiang today, the times have provided him with a broad stage of struggle, and he has also realized himself on this stage. When explaining the ideological cultivation of young people, General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly dialectically expounded the relationship between "big" and "small": the so-called "big" is to take charge of the overall situation when planning, and the so-called "small" is to see the spirit in doing every little thing, completing every task, and performing every duty. There is a way to do small things as big things, "those who get the big can be small at the same time." Looking back at the process of Wei Xiangqin, a disabled youth, who realized his dream of Qinghua, vividly shows that all the struggles of the young people in the new era who dare to "have a dream" and the courage to "chase their dreams" are all completed in the logic of the era of "big" and "small".
It is the torrent of the times that has created the unique opportunities and opportunities of each generation of young people; let the portrait of the times always bear witness to the youth of each of us!
Article/Reporter Lei Jia Jiang Ruojing