In August 2016, he crossed the South China Sea on a Filipino fishing boat
At the age of 30, I did three things: I flew to Minsk, 6,400 kilometers from Beijing, and interviewed a former journalist face-to-face. Sail in an 8-meter-long five-person fishing boat and sail the most controversial waters in the world at the time. The first time I set foot in the country that determined my career path.
It was 2016, my second year working for Triad Life Weekly. The former colleague I visited was Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the New Science Nobel Prize in Literature, in the South China Sea, which was still mired in the storm of international arbitration at the time, and that country was one of the symbols of the post-"Cold War" era , Iraq. The winter before I entered elementary school, when I first heard the term "Gulf War" on tv news, I wanted to know the answer to a question: "Why did the war break out?" "In order to find the answer, I made the School of International Relations of Chinese Min University my first choice when applying for the university. And everything you went through before the age of 30 seemed to be preparing for the final arrival.
Alexievich described to me this way of her young journalistic career:
"At that time, I was most concerned with the deep thoughts of people's hearts, and in the newspapers and magazines where I worked, it was not easy to infuse such an abstract theme into daily reporting. But in retrospect, it was a fun, nostalgic experience. I went to many places in Belarus, where I came into contact with and talked to all kinds of people, and gained a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of people's daily lives and mental states. This laid an important foundation for my later writing. ”
When Alexievich visited Beijing in the summer of 2016, he held the cover story I had written three months earlier about her
This coincides with my own feelings: In my third or fourth year of undergraduate, I began to realize that international relations theory is merely an abstract condensation of reality, a large-scale "map" on which people perceive the world, but by no means the world itself. The symbols of mountains, rivers, and seas marked on the "map" (which at different times have been called "power politics," "offensive realism," "soft power," or other crooked terms) may seem sufficient to provide a logical and self-consistent path of interpretation of what happens in reality to the beginner, but it may be a trap—the complex and fragile creature of the "man", whose level of cognition is limited, and who is often confused by the light and shadow in the crypt. When the researcher is engaged in what he considers to be "dissection", "refinement" and "summary", those elements related to the complexity and uncertainty of man himself are often eliminated together, and the final result is a set of "unchanging iron laws" that imitate Newton's mechanical system. But there are so many preconditions necessary for this "iron law" to come into effect that they can neither restore the face of history nor provide reliable guidance for the future. Clearly, there is a great tension between this abstract, minimalist "map" and the complete reality—"the father of war," Clausewitz, called it "the fog."
Although the periodic submission of "maps" may be the reason for the existence of the discipline of international politics, what is summoned on the distant horizon is the obsession with knowing human beings themselves: almost all existing disciplines, whether humanities, natural sciences or social sciences, began with the classical era of people asking "who am I" and "how should I live?". When I began studying the history of international relations as a freshman, the first lecture was Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian War. The great Greek did not lay out his views on the whole war in great detail, using only a materialized expression—a "giant movement." As an organic life form of countless individuals, the state will also experience growth, aging and death, and will also fall into sudden accidents. And war is undoubtedly the most intense and consumptive "movement" among them.
The movement should be understood in such a way that when a war begins, all the rules, categories, organizations and orders of everyday life will withdraw, and the impermanent fate itself will act as the supreme arbiter. The most astonishing courage, the most precious loyalty, the most brutal violence, the most despicable betrayal will emerge one by one in the course of the war and push this "movement" to new heights again and again. When peacetime people talk about "reason" and "civilization" with all their might, war exposes man's "other possibility" to itself in a forceful way and forces it to accept it. I think this also constitutes the source of my interest in Iraq, the war, and even the cause of the war when I was a child, because the news coverage of the Gulf War for months was very different from the peaceful environment in which I lived. Perhaps based on similar feelings, when Tolstoy personally experienced a long and brutal siege in Sevastopol, he wrote a binary antagonistic title: War and Peace.
In contrast to "possibilities", war also continues to expose people's "impossibility". Shrewd strategic calculations are often destroyed by sudden accidents, and the shadow of defeat is always hidden in the glory of the present victory, "evil often accumulates in the slightest, and wisdom and courage are mostly drowned." In the fiercest collision, the impermanence of fate, the greatness and smallness of man, are all revealed for a while. According to Clausewitz, the trinity of violence (passion), contingency ("friction"),and political purpose (rational planning) constitutes the whole picture of the god of war; through its observation and exploration, it is almost intuitive to obtain an understanding of human diversity and complexity, and then become humble and clear- In fact, through the "abnormal" high-intensity political behavior of war, to explore some answers about the whole of human society, it is my intellectual motivation to rush to the end of the world and go deep into the field frequently in the past few years.
In July 2018, in Charikal, Afghanistan, the remains of Soviet tanks were hoisted
Before I was 19 years old, this search was mostly in the form of reading and thinking. Beginning in 2005, under the patronage of the magazines Modern Ships and Studies in the History of War, I was given the opportunity to write and express freely for more than 10 years, and while completing my undergraduate and master's programs, I developed personal views on certain issues in maritime strategy, geopolitics, and military history, and put them into publication and publication. The experience of working for Sanlian Life Weekly from the age of 29 has led me to the third stage: still high-density reading, thinking and writing, but no longer relying on paper materials simply; but through the close observation of the scene of the conflict area and the living "people", a more three-dimensional time and space is established. Admittedly, this is a kind of "introverted" writing; but I believe that similar questions and explorations have almost always been throughout human history.
In September 2016, a group of Shiite believers participating in the Ashura Festival celebrations took place on the streets of Baghdad
In the fall of 2015, after completing the planning of two cover topics for the weekly magazine, "70 Years of Victory in the War of Resistance" and "70 Years of Victory in the World Anti-Fascist War", my journey to find answers officially began. For more than two years, my partners Li Yanan, Zhang Lei, and Huang Yu and I have traveled to Baghdad, which is divided into countless disconnected spaces by concrete explosion-proof walls, in and out of Saddam Hussein's former palace and the countless ashes left over from the authoritarian era. In Damascus, the Syrian capital of six years into civil war, we carefully shrugged off the secret police on street corners and drank one vodka after another with young people who were hopelessly left on the island. In the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, we sat on the ground with the devout devotees of the Al-Haram, and also at the hejaz railway terminal, which is far away from damascus departure station. And two weeks ago, I had just concluded a treacherous trip to Afghanistan and had a close encounter and interview with a figure who had only been known in the past, the great warlord Hekmatyar and his sons.
In August 2017, in Damascus, the Syrian capital, employees of FM Sham, the largest commercial radio station in the area controlled by government forces, were spoken to
This is not the kind of adventure that travel enthusiasts will imagine, full of freshness and excitement. In fact, most of the time I have to constantly struggle with anxiety, uncertainty, and contingencies (from the whim of a customs official to the translator's timidity to escape): it is like returning to the original state, a person facing the abyss alone, relying only on unverifiable kindness from others and luck. Fortunately, due to the special environment and interesting topic selection of Sanlian Life Weekly, I do not necessarily see work travel and writing as a transactional burden, but more as an integral part of a grand intellectual exploration journey. In the journey of observing human groups, one also further recognizes oneself.
In July 2018, he took a group photo with his photography partner Li Yanan with our Pashtun driver
Fast forward to the summer of my 30th year, lying on the bonnet of the 8-meter-long and 1.8-meter-wide Philippine fishing boat, I sailed from Palawan into the South China Sea. Under the canopy of wind and rain, waves and stars, the fishing boat crossed the invisible nine-dash line and sailed into the vicinity of 9 degrees 03 minutes north latitude and 116 degrees 66 minutes east longitude, between the sand of the captain of the Nansha Islands and the dark sand of the half moon. At midnight, when I saw the dim yellow light in the direction of Mischief Reef in the middle of the rough seas, I suddenly recalled the time when I published my first paper on the South China Sea in a military magazine 10 years ago. For individuals, 10 years is a long enough time in life; but on the islands, oceans, and ruins at the end of the world, everything seems to change very slowly.
To search for answers to the ultimate question with one's limited energy and life is doomed from the outset to be a patriot. But just by thinking that this quest began at the beginning of human civilization and continues to this day, we can see that what has been done is not only not lonely, but also worthwhile.
Countdown to the 1000th issue of Sanlian Life Weekly: Less than 2 weeks away!
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