Zhou Guoping Is a well-known scholar and prose writer, born in Shanghai in 1945. His representative works include "Nietzsche: At the Turning Point of the Century", "Kindness, Rich and Noble", "Lady: Notes of a Father" and so on.
Beijing News reporter Pu Feng photographed
Say No to the Standard Answer:
Zhou Guoping in the examination paper
Author: Zhou Guoping
Edition: Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House
May 2017
Among contemporary Chinese writers, Zhou Guoping is perhaps the one whose works have been selected as the most selected chinese examination papers and textbooks for primary and secondary schools. His latest book is a collection of 70 essays scattered across grade-level language papers and textbooks, and he comments on the test questions in response to them, titled "Say No to the Standard Answer: Zhou Guoping in the Examination Paper".
This kind of unique style of "anthology" is probably unprecedented, and if it had been placed 40 years ago, even he himself would not have thought that his name would be associated with the examinations of thousands of students. At that time, he was nervously preparing for his fate-rewriting exam, which would transfer him back to Beijing from the remote resource mountains of Guangxi, ending a decade-long career in the queue and returning to his haunted "spiritual hometown".
Since then, there has been one less teacher and propaganda officer at the party school of the county party committee, and one more writer who has stood alone in the world with philosophical prose. Written by/Beijing News reporter Xu Xueqin
The young people accept the fate of the arrangement, or fight
Zhou Guoping was born in Shanghai in 1945 and graduated from the Department of Philosophy of Peking University in 1968. After working for a year and a half on an army farm in Hunan, he and more than sixty college students accepted the fate of the arrangement and were assigned to Resource County in Guangxi, where he stayed for eight years. Without the 1978 graduate school exams, he might not have been able to walk through the rolling hills for the rest of his life.
The resources are located in the north of Guangxi, bordering Hunan, and are named because they are the source of the Zijiang River. According to Zhou Guoping's recollection, the county seat is very small, built on a mountain pass, looking up at the mountains on all sides, the residents are only a few thousand, only one street, can be walked in a few minutes. The only road to the outside world, on one side is a cliff, on the other side is a deep valley, the road is narrow and uneven, and the wrong car is quite thrilling.
Zhou Guoping came from the highest school, and was pinned high hopes on by local officials, so he stayed in the political work group of the county revolutionary committee. After the organ regained its old name, he served as the theoretical officer of the Propaganda Department of the county party committee.
In such an environment, if you want to climb up, it is entirely possible to only be an official, with the conditions of Zhou Guoping at that time. He has a high level of education, the leader is willing to cultivate, as long as he is willing, he can rise in the past. But soon, he found that this road could not go on, "the biggest problem is that I like to read books too much, I like to write too much, this habit can not change." 」 ”
After work, he shut himself in his room to read and write, so he got an evaluation, "the stink of intellectuals has not changed, pride and complacency, divorced from the masses." He gradually realized that if he wanted to satisfy the people around him and take the road of becoming an official, he had to change his habits of reading and writing, mix with everyone, play cards, drink, and chat, but this was obviously inconsistent with his own disposition.
Although reading and writing at that time were of no use, there was no possibility of publication, and even risks, but this way of life he could not change, and he was unwilling to seek perfection. The consequence of this is that Zhou Guoping has never been promoted, nor can he join the party, and the leaders have given up "cultivating" him. Four years later, he was transferred to a more remote county party school as a teacher.
The party school is some distance from the county seat and uses the old thatched house of the May Seventh Cadre School. There were only five people in the whole school, and apart from him, there was a principal, a teacher, a cook, and an accountant. Life is monotonous, the environment is desolate, and ghost fires can often be seen in the wilderness. But he likes this life because he can read without restraint.
When he was in the Propaganda Department, there were no books to read except the works of Marxism and Lenin, so he read all the "Complete Works of Marx and Engels" and "The Complete Works of Lenin", took careful notes, and wrote a paper of 40,000 words. After the "Batch Forest Batch Hole", the bookstore began to sell "Shi Ji", "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Han Shu", "Han Feizi", and "Xunzi", and these "Guoxue" foundations were also laid at that time.
But these can not have the slightest change in the future of the individual, the days are still monotonously repeated day by day, and life seems to be able to see the head at a glance. Sometimes, like crazy, he would be alone in the house shouting, "Is this how my whole life has been explained?" This painful self-doubt makes people desperate.
Reading and writing became the only way for him to fight against the reality of forced labor, and he did not want to let the days pass in vain, and wanted to make life have a little meaning.
A turning point in life, a test, back to the "spiritual hometown"
At a time when the class was solidified and the population flow was strictly restricted, Zhou Guoping thought that this life would last a lifetime, but with the collapse of the "Gang of Four" and the news of the resumption of the college entrance examination and the graduate school examination, he suddenly felt hope.
On October 12, 1977, the State Council approved and forwarded the Ministry of Education's "Opinions on the Enrollment of Higher Education in 1977" and the "Opinions on the Recruitment of Graduate Students in Colleges and Universities", the latter of which proposed, "In the fields of philosophy and social sciences, it is necessary to actively recruit graduate students and strengthen the building of the marxist-Leninist theoretical contingent." Priority should be given to those disciplines and majors that are about to be broken and lack of successors, so as to solve the phenomenon of 'green and yellow' as soon as possible. ”
This enrollment even lowered the academic threshold, "workers, peasants, soldiers, and on-the-job workers with professional expertise and research ability are not restricted by academic qualifications, but must have the same level of education." High school students and university students with particularly good grades and real research talents may also apply for the examination upon recommendation by the school. ”
Two months later, the Ministry of Education issued the Opinions on the Arrangement of Graduate School Enrollment in Colleges and Universities in 1978, deciding to merge the 1977 and 1978 graduate school enrollment plans, and officially resuming the enrollment of graduate students in 1978.
Zhou Guoping recalled, "I lived that kind of life, how I looked forward to returning to Beijing and engaging in spiritual labor, so I applied for the first graduate school as soon as I had the opportunity." At that time, there were many people taking the college entrance examination, only four people in the county took the postgraduate examination, and Zhou Guoping applied for the newly established Soviet Contemporary Philosophy Direction of the Philosophy Department of the Graduate School of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Fortunately, in that year, the application for graduate school did not require organizational approval, and after he applied for the examination, some people said that "Zhou Guoping came up with resources and dreamed." He spent half a year preparing for the exam and carefully studied the western philosophy history textbooks compiled by the Philosophy Department of Peking University, including "Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy", "European Philosophy from the 16th to the 17th Century", "French Philosophy in the 18th Century", and "German Philosophy in the 19th Century", which basically included the most important parts of the history of Western philosophy, all of which were selected articles and excerpts from the original work, and finally his major scored a maximum score of 96 points.
After passing the written test, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences sent people to the political trial, one was Liu Qilin, director of the Ethics Teaching and Research Department of the Institute of Philosophy, and the other was Bo Xicheng , deputy director of the Scientific Research Department of the Institute of Philosophy (Bo Yibo's son), and the two went to the Organization Department of the county party committee to investigate the situation, and after the investigation, they told Zhou Guoping, "They said a lot of bad things about you, but the shortcomings they think are all advantages in our opinion, and the poison of the 'Gang of Four' here is too serious." There is no problem with your admission, just wait for the re-examination. ”
In July, Zhou Guoping went to Beijing to participate in the re-examination, and then returned to the resources to wait for the notice. On September 14, he received his acceptance letter and was finally able to return to his "spiritual homeland". Zhou Guoping said, "Life has started again, a truly meaningful life." I got this possibility, and it turned out that I didn't even have this possibility. ”
Return to Beijing The "cultural hill" set off a philosophical upsurge
In October 1978, Zhou Guoping walked out of the guangxi ravine and returned to Beijing after a decade of absence, "immediately in an exciting atmosphere." Beijing in the early stage of transformation is a scene of thawing.
However, his graduate school life was not very satisfactory. At the beginning of the founding of the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, it did not have its own school building, and lived on the campus of Beijing Normal University, renting classrooms and dormitories there. With the exception of the Department of Philosophy, the Beijing Municipal Trade Union Cadre School rents a house and houses twelve people in a large classroom, each with only one bed and a small desk, which is very crowded.
After the lease expired for one year, I moved three more times, once in the noisy motel "Big Car Shop", once in the remote Shijingshan Eleventh School, and the last time in the improvised tin house on the construction site next to the Jingshun Highway. For three years, not only was there no place to live, but the curriculum was also very irregular. Due to the lack of experience in running schools, the curriculum and teachers cannot be implemented, and the level of the lecturers is uneven, "giving people the feeling of messy and temporary coping.".
Fortunately, Zhou Guoping has always liked to teach himself, and it doesn't matter. He said, "None of that matters. For me, what is important is that life has started anew, I feel that I have endless energy, and the road ahead once again leads to all kinds of beautiful and unknown things. ”
As the first batch of graduate students in the past 13 years, Zhou Guoping's generation of young scholars naturally intervened in the ideological market at that time. He first proceeded from his own professional Soviet philosophy and overturned the case for the criticized Soviet philosopher Deborin, pointing out that the bad impact of this erroneous criticism on China, including the popularity of pragmatism on the issue of the relationship between theory and practice, simplifying and vulgarizing philosophy; on the issue of the relationship between philosophy and politics, one-sidedly emphasizing philosophy as serving politics actually abolished philosophy; in the history of philosophy, one-sidedly emphasizing the revolutionary transformation significance of Marxist philosophy obliterated the value of human philosophical exploration for two thousand years. These views were published in the journal Unfinished by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Immediately after, he began to translate and import the works of the German philosopher Nietzsche, and successively published Nietzsche: At the Turning Point of the Century, The Birth of Tragedy - Selected Writings of Nietzsche's Aesthetics, Nietzsche's Collected Poems, and "The Twilight of idols", which became an important promoter of "Nietzsche fever" in the 80s.
At the same time, Zhou Guoping, Together with Gan Yang, Xu Youyu, Chen Jiaying, Zhao Yuesheng and others from Peking University and the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, established the editorial board of "Culture: China and the World", focusing on translation, publishing dozens of Western philosophical works in two or three years, setting off an upsurge of reading Western philosophical masters such as Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger, and "Culture: China and the World" also became one of the three "cultural mountains" at that time. Since then, his life has slowly moved towards the path of a philosophical prose writer, and the beautiful and timeless prose has penetrated into the hearts of generations.
In the 1978 postgraduate examination, the number of applicants nationwide reached 63,000, and 10,708 were finally enrolled. The personal fate of this group of people was changed by an examination, and later became the backbone of various fields, becoming famous scholars, writers, scientists, and artists, including Qian Liqun, Yi Zhongtian, Wen Rumin, Ge Jianxiong, Xiao Gongqin, Chen Danqing, Cao Yuanzheng, and others, who returned from the countryside to the city, from the posts of workers, farmers, and teachers to graduate classrooms, and have since profoundly influenced and shaped contemporary China.