Young Initiators and Their Times

Note: This article was posted a few days ago. The new version has made a comprehensive adjustment in the structure, reducing some personal narratives and adding more analytical text.

When I wrote this topic, my question was: why are there no thinkers and innovators like Liang Qichao, Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, and Lu Xun among the young enlighteners of this era? Why didn't "Beidou" become "Xinmin Congbao" or "New Youth"? Why did Wanmen University not become a night school for workers in the Internet age, but finally turned into a blood-sucking company that ran away with money?

Presumably some people will find these questions amusing, either that I think highly of them, or that I am being self-indulgent. But when they made their grand debut, why didn't they have such a grand vision? The slogan of Beidou in those days was, "Self-enlightenment of Chinese college students". As an online publication, Beidou echoes the general trend of the rise of social media in China. Instead of requesting manuscripts from authors who have already achieved fame and fortune, Beidou establishes connections with up-and-coming young authors at that time, with clear but also diverse concepts as its banner. , Enlightenment first led to enlightenment, and the limelight was the same for a while.

When Wanmen University established a school, it shouted "lowering the threshold of Chinese education". The founder Tong Zhe said that the ideal of education for all should be realized through network technology, but for ordinary students, it is not self-enlightenment to realize self-education through Wanmen platform and network technology? If Beidou has a certain degree of elitism, then Wanmen University is more popular in comparison, and is supported by more ordinary students. It has become a trend for everyone to post their Wanmen University student ID card on Renren.com. Big Vs like Li Shuo (there was no such statement at the time) and Beidou, the largest organization on Renren.com, also made frequent gestures to Tong Zhe. Even though I had gotten rid of the dependence on Renren. Zhe related posts swipe.

There is a gap of nearly four years between Beidou and Wanmen University. Beidou was established in 2008, while Wanmen was established in 2012. When Wanmen rose, Beidou had already declined. But Tong Zhe himself, born in 1987, is older than most of Beidou's early members, so it's not so much that Beidou and Wanmen are two generations of enlighteners, it's better that they share a common zeitgeist, just in different periods Just appear. Some of these common psychology of the times will be carried through to the end, and some will not be revealed until the second stage, that is, after their first-order "idealism" has basically dissipated.

Their first common psychology of the times is related to the "time", that is, they ignore the particularity of China, are full of blind optimism about the changes of the times, and base their personal achievements on selling this optimism. In Xu Tie's (friend of Tong Zhe's friend) and GQ's report, Tong Zhe said this to Xu Tie, who returned to China. Have you felt the breath of the times surging in the hot flashes of Beijing's summer? I think that group of idealistic young people at that time thought they felt such a breath of the times. Along with it, there is Jiang Ha's words, of course, one's fate depends on one's struggle, but the process of history must also be taken into consideration. "The breath of the times" and "the process of history" were called "potentials" in ancient times. Those who can understand the general trend are of course heroes among people. Why should they be limited by small details? So Socrates' "virtue is knowledge" has obtained an alternative interpretation here.

For Beidou, what is the change of the times? That is, political change will come in a few years, and "my generation" is just in time. There is a popular article, "College Students, Don't Be Victims of Social Change", which is from Jiang Jian, one of the founders of Beidou. There are some words in it: "Today China's reform and opening up is halfway through, and there are other Half of it will come sooner or later, it's just a matter of time. The first half of the reforms are the survival of the fittest in the economic field, and many people can't figure out how they were eliminated by the times; I believe the second half of the reforms will be the same." "When the parasitic power disappears , when taxpayers' money can no longer be freely used as party property, when the totalitarian bubble bursts, those young civilians who once squeezed their heads to take the civil service exams but lack real means of earning a living will only face unemployment. Of course, they are all just A victim of social change.”[1]

Since the bet is on political changes, it is impossible to say that Beidou does not have any political ideas and organization. Beidou's background is liberalism, with a general belief in liberal democracy, but it is also compatible with left-wing anarchists like Bakhtin. In terms of organization, the internal division of Beidou is quite systematic, but in addition to internal members, there are also “pan Beidou circles” formed by contributors and readers, which are mostly pan-liberal. With common ideas and formal or informal connections, they have also established extensive "connectivity" in reality, which is exactly what Wang Shuo said in "Sunny Days", "Five lakes and four seas are brothers." I heard of a friend who achieved a nationwide poverty-stricken tour through Beidou. He bought the cheapest standing ticket. Every time he went to a place, he would find a local Beidou person and live in their dormitory or home. It is also common for Beidou people to help each other. Although there is still a distance from anarchist mutual assistance, among friends who trust each other, there is often the meaning of making money.

Earlier, I said that Beidou has the same popularity, but how to quantify this influence is not something I can do in such an article. In Renren's "political circle", Beidou is of course everyone knows, and even once became synonymous with Renren's liberals. As for the size of the political circle, according to my estimation, it is between several thousand and tens of thousands, depending on the definition of the political circle. Outside the political circle, there seem to be people who know it. After all, the forwarding of Renren is much more open than WeChat, and it is easy to "get out of the circle". There are really not many people who know Beidou outside of Renren. The feelings on Douban, of course, may also be biased). This also shows that Beidou and Renren are quite clearly bound. Although Beidou has its own website, few people skip Renren and go directly to Beidou's website to read articles.

This involves the question of why Beidou declined later. A group of talented young people from prestigious schools has created an organization that is well-known among college students. To realize the self-enlightenment of young people and form a network of mutual communication and mutual assistance, it is difficult not to let some core characters have psychological aspects. The expansion of the world, I think that all the heroes in the world have entered my camp. One of the manifestations of psychological expansion is serious infighting. But infighting may not be the reason for the decline. Organizations that are on the rise usually rise while infighting, such as the Chinese Communist Party a hundred years ago. If we want to say that organizational factors have any influence, it is probably because the main creators have graduated and stepped into the society one after another, and the leadership has not been connected, but this reason is not the main reason. From 2008 to 2012, it happened to be the period when the mobile Internet was gradually taking shape. Weibo appeared in 2010, and WeChat appeared in 2012. The era of mobile Internet is more suitable for fragmented reading. On platforms such as Weibo, with the rise of self-media influencers, more and more people advertise "enlightenment". Fighting alone does not affect efficiency, and it can also reduce the internal friction caused by the organization. In this regard, Beidou's advantage has become a disadvantage.

The technology iterates too fast, and it is overturned before it can give the enlightener a response. It may be because of this. Since this period, some Beidou people in the past have turned from disappointment to rejection of idealism, and turned to embrace the economic tide. Among the core figures of Beidou, after graduation, they rarely engage in work related to enlightenment, public welfare, and academia. Most of them become members of the employment army. With their education and ability, they can do whatever they can find. Two or three years later, their incomes have surprised themselves, that is, while their enlightened ideals have been severely thwarted, the market has rewarded them with more than expected returns. This made some of them start to deny their past in a rage. When I was pulled into one of their groups in 2014, I saw that the people in it frequently posted about their income and various luxuries. The level of those income and luxury goods was even lower than that of the middle class, but because of their financial constraints in the past Getting used to it, this is enough to make the former enlightened elite feel that their youth has been mispaid.

This is what I said earlier. After the first-order ideal dissipates, another kind of zeitgeist will emerge, that is, an inexplicable fascination with business and technology. In this regard, Tong Zhe is similar to them, but a little more complicated than them. From 2008 to 2012, when Beidou was active, it happened to be the last two years of Tong Zhe's university and the two years of Paris Normal University. We might call this period of his "pure idealism". At this time, his idol was Einstein , the ideal is to be a theoretical physicist. After 2012, Beidou gradually lost its influence, and Tong Zhe returned to China from France and founded Wanmen. This was a period when Tong Zhe's idealism and commercial technology were combined, and ended in 2016 when Wanmen University was no longer free; then It was a pure businessman period, which ended at the beginning of 2019 when Tong Zhe started to speculate on real estate; in the end, he became a profiteer who was mercenary and not trustworthy. The user who repaid the loan, as well as the employee who held the property for him and was still owed wages.

In 2012, Tong Zhe's academic ideals began to encounter bottlenecks. "The professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure told him that the world only needs 10 theoretical physicists, and there are 37 students in his class. He and his friends chatted in frustration when they were partying in Japan, and he gradually couldn't keep up with his classmates. It was the first time that he frequently lost his hair because of his studies."[2] That is, in this year, he recorded his "A Zhe's Physics Lesson", which received tens of thousands of hits, and received "Korean" Inspired by "Khan Academy" and Coursera, so he dropped out of school and returned to China to start a business without paying off phone bills and dormitory fees[3], in order to do free online education.

From the point of view of "Emperor of Manchukuo" Li Shuo, Tong Zhe has "betrayed" since Wanmen University launched a history course in mainland China. Li Shuo's own ascendance started from the deconstruction of China's official narrative of modern and modern history, to overturn the verdict of Manchukuo, and then put forward the so-called "China Disintegration Theory". He has also gained a large number of followers on Renren, which he calls "shuoists". It is worth mentioning that, due to the emergence of Li Shuo and more right-wing anti-establishment opponents in 2010, Beidou, a group originally inclined towards right-wing liberalism, suddenly became a "democratic little fresh".

Li Shuo's ideological allegations against history courses are not persuasive to ordinary audiences, so he chose the fact that Tong Zhe did not have a degree in Paris as a weapon to attack Tong Zhe. Li Shuo probably has a preference for Tong Zhe. With his arrogant personality, he was actually lost in the first round of the match, and asked his good friend of ten thousand years to "tear down the Berlin Wall" to make a rescue. At that time, Tong Zhe's identity as a "Master of Higher Education in Paris" had been questioned. Xu Tie shouted to Li Shuo when defending Tong Zhe, don't come to Tong Zhe's fault, this is not a level you can reach. However, looking at all kinds of evidence, it is basically a certainty that Tong Zhe did not graduate from the normal school. In later words, I thought that Tong Zhe was going to be "flooded". I did not expect that in 2014, Wanmen University received an investment of 2 million US dollars from Chen Yizhou. bigger and bigger. Before the news of Tong Zhe's explosion, Wanmen University could be considered to be ranked first in the field of online education.

I didn't follow up on this matter, and I don't know how Tong Zhe got everyone's understanding in the follow-up. This paragraph is not covered in the current media reports. Judging from GQ's reports, Tong Zhe basically struggled between how to adhere to the ideal of free online education and how to maintain the company's survival. Xu Tie defended him in the article, saying that starting a business is not easy, but in my opinion, this kind of insistence is not so much for the vast number of students who need to be fed in knowledge, but because he knows very well that once he gives up free money, his ideal It will cease to exist. Even if he succeeds, he is no different from an ordinary dividend recipient of the era, let alone changing China.

In 2016, Chen Yizhou's two million dollars had been exhausted. Tong Zhe looked for a way out everywhere to extend the life of Wanmen University. In the end, it was still a lifetime membership that charged 9,999 yuan with valuable appeal, and Wanmen University became a "Wanmen University". Tong Zhe, who has tasted the sweetness of charging fees, has a morbid pursuit of profit at this time. He wants to "list", just like Meng Xiaojun in "Partners in China", he must ring the bell in Times Square, New York, in order to wash the ideal one. And the shame of being wiped out again and again. However, he still overestimated himself and underestimated the difficulty of starting a business. In reality, Yu Minhong, the prototype of Cheng Dongqing (Meng Xiaojun's partner), had to bring some The employees started live broadcasts and endured the ridicule of third-rate media reporters. Tong Zhe, who once invested in Yu Minhong, conceded defeat before the storm, or even before the epidemic, he began to do deep house management in the education and training industry, fooling employees to raise funds to buy houses.

In my opinion, the failure of Beidou and Wanmen can be attributed to the times, but how to deal with and exit after failure is mainly a matter of personal choice. "Self-enlightenment of college students", specifically, is to rely on those who are the first to "enlightenment" among college students, through writing articles and other presentations, to influence and drive more college students to read, think, communicate, and establish contacts. Create a liberal consensus first among the intellectual class. From the perspective of the time, it was probably the most logical path that young liberals could think of[4], which not only echoed the idea of "civil society" outside the school, but also was in line with the practice of modern sages. At the beginning, they were compared with the Restoration and the May Fourth Movement. Some people may question the level of these first enlighteners. It should be admitted that the level of these people is indeed limited. For example, Zhou Yan, who was praised by Beidou Li at that time, has almost become a parallel import in the field of modern history. But enlightenment has never been just a question of level. Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, Chen Duxiu and others who introduced Western learning more than a hundred years ago also added a lot of their own prejudices to the introduction, and they also made a lot of arbitrary words about the objects they criticized. . The key point is that today is not an era of Western learning, but an era in which China will gradually establish its own cultural subjectivity (this is also the origin of the later "four self-confidences").

In contrast, Tong Zhe's idea seems to be more convenient, that is, to "depoliticize" enlightenment, and even achieve value neutrality, and only talk about "education" in terms of promoting intellectual progress. To be honest, I've never been impressed by any part of Tong Zhe's ideals. Because in my opinion, free online educational resources are already everywhere, and Wanmen University has not made much breakthrough in this regard. Doors are much better. I also found an article written by Tong Zhe in 2016 on the Internet, which said that we should "make high-quality education as cheap as tap water"[5], but there is a paradox hidden in this: education has reached a certain level, to achieve It is not only literacy and popular science, but "excellence". Since it is excellence, there must be comparisons. If there are comparisons, it is impossible for everyone to be the same, and it is impossible to be as cheap as tap water. The most important thing is that to achieve a value-neutral "educational" change, just like the "depoliticized" social change advocated by some liberals before, is tantamount to scheming with tigers. This is also the source of the conflict between Tong Zhe and Li Shuo at that time: the so-called value neutrality in China will only stand on the side of power in the end, because power is the coordinate itself.

Comprehend sympathetically, we can attribute the flaws in the ideas of Beidou and Wanmen to the limitations of the times, and put them in a broader context. This limitation is related to the idea of "enlightenment" itself and the idea of right-wing liberalism. The evolution of China is related to some extent. According to Steven Pinker, the four components of "enlightenment" are: reason, science, humanism, and progress. The one that has the greatest tension with China's reality is "progress", but this tension is deeper. The more self-proclaimed elite, the easier it may be to be confused by it. In the 40 years since the reform, China seems to be "progressing", especially in the economic field, not only lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, but also becoming the second economy in the world. In the political and social fields, although progress is not as obvious as economics, it always implies "hope" in a vulgar way, making people unconsciously look forward to it. However, such progress is extremely rare in Chinese history. In the words of Mr. Jin Guantao, China has its own "super-stable structure", which also means that if the reform is to involve the fundamentals of Chinese society, it must pay many times more effort than other societies. What's wrong is that the concept of "progress" in the Enlightenment and the changes in China since the reform made it too easy for some Enlightenment supporters to believe that the times will push China to continue to reform towards a deeper aspect of modernity, and even We must also follow the Western world into a "post-modern society".

In fact, Tong Zhe and Beidou people, even after giving up enlightenment/academia, are still extremely confident in their ability to judge the trend of the times, and they agree that in places where enlightenment/academic cannot change China, business and technology can. On the one hand, of course, it has something to do with the entrepreneurial wave of China's web 2.0. On the other hand, it is hard to say that it has nothing to do with the spread of "neoliberalism". According to this version, economic freedom is the most fundamental freedom, and business is the most powerful force that can change the world. Tong Zhe and Beidou people both consciously or unconsciously share this set of ideas, so while those Beidou people are searching for dividends at the end of the era, they start to laugh at the idea of letting college students "self-enlightenment" in the past; The starting point and luck are better than them, which also makes him eligible to go through a complete round of capital games, and degenerate more thoroughly than them.

The above-mentioned right-wing liberal concept has produced many deformed offspring in China. One is to change from believing that "economic freedom can promote economic prosperity" to seeing "economic prosperity" as an end in itself, and then to believe that all means to promote economic prosperity are good, thus opening the door to statism , and even in the end, turning nationalism into an end. There are not many such people in China, the representatives of which are Li Ziyang and Lian Yue, who used to be followers of the Austrian school. The other is the liberalism that swallows the outlook on life with economic liberalism. Originally, liberalism encourages a diverse outlook on life, from JS Mill to John Rawls, but economic freedom Socialism highly values the fairness of the market, which makes it easy to launch hastily. The income a person earns in the market represents his personal value, which reduces the diverse outlook on life into a kind of "everything is for making money". " outlook on life. This concept is very popular in Chinese success circles. In Tong Zhe, we can also see how it erodes the host's subjectivity step by step. After Tong Zhe chose to realize his personal value in the commercial field, his personal value is no longer determined by him, but by Investors, markets and customers decide. In the WeChat group of "Wanmen Full Rebate Class", one of the users on Tong Zhe's platform said: "The IP traffic of the word 'Tong Zhe' alone is worth more than 100 million." It's not so much a compliment to him as it's a definition of him.

However, business and technology can only change individuals, but not China. Ever since Zhao Dingxin put forward the theory of "performance legitimacy", we have habitually believed that China's state leaders will pay special attention to people's livelihood. Following this logic, as long as the ruling party pays attention to people's livelihood, they have to pay attention to commerce and technology. All systems and policies that are conducive to the development of commerce and technology should be promoted, which will lay the foundation for subsequent changes. However, more than 10 million college students graduated this year, and as the two industries that attracted the most fresh graduates, the education and training industry was directly wiped out by a single order last year, and the Internet was also trembling under the slogan of "common prosperity". Due to the unpredictable anti-epidemic policies, more and more foreign companies want to leave Shanghai this year, and more and more foreign capital wants to leave China. People's expectations and confidence in the economy have fallen into a trough. All this shows that the so-called capital, market, business, and even people's livelihood have little weight in the face of Chinese politics. Capitalism did enter China, but there was no liberal democracy, only state capitalism, and digital technology also entered China. There was no “digital activism” like the West, but “digital totalitarianism”. , facial recognition and artificial intelligence are fully used to combat destabilizing forces.

More than a decade later, the group of young opinion leaders on Renren.com at that time have now become middle-class or even above. Among them, Justin Sun has almost become the most "successful" representative of the post-90s generation, but every time his news comes out, he is booed by the old users of Renren. Li Shuo, who turned against him because of Tong Zhe's "feeding poisonous weeds", after floating in Flushing for nearly ten years, lamented that he had been on the wrong team all these years, and suddenly showed his loyalty to the party, hoping to be recruited, and volunteered to be there Twitter took on the propaganda. A former leader of Beidou, after graduating, not only engaged in some stability maintenance work within the system, but also expressed his thoughts that before, too young was too simple. And Tong Zhe, the son of Renren.com, whose idols ranged from Einstein to Zuckerberg, gradually became Xu Jiayin and Jia Yueting.

The reason why I am willing to take the time to write about Beidou and Wanmen is because I think there are too many traces of this era condensed in them, and even their mentality can be regarded as a microcosm of the overall mentality of the Chinese middle class: there are generalities He has a liberal tendency and a desire for a more just society, but he believes too much in China's national destiny and national capabilities, so the former is not worth mentioning in the face of the latter. However, I don't agree with some people who say that they will become what they are today because of the times. They made their own choices at several nodes of the era, and it was these choices that made them who they are today. For Tong Zhe, I tend to think that he has not changed from beginning to end. He just wants to realize his personal value. If theoretical physics is not good, it is to change China's education. If it is not good to change Chinese education, then the company is listed. If the company does not go public, it will at least make a fortune. He lacked faith in a holistic belief in his heart, and he recognized nothing but the creed of "can't fail." In Xu Tie's words, he is never willing to be lonely, and wants to create greater influence. Once he goes to the opposite of idealism, it will be a success.

Some people will think that I am neither close to them nor someone who has worked with them, so I am not suitable to write such an article, but I personally think it is the opposite, precisely because I do not have a deep relationship with them, neither do I. Infected with their disappointment, as well as the rebellious psychology after the disappointment. Some people will think that their problem is that they are too idealistic. This is a problem that young people of any era will have, and there is nothing particularly worth writing about. But perhaps to paraphrase Toon's words, idealism is always similar, but idealism collapses in different eras for different reasons and manifestations.

Sometimes I still feel sad when I think about it. From the original intention of Beidou and Wanmen, these concepts are not perfect, and there are more or less operational problems, but they are still admirable social experiments. In that era, enlightenment was indeed a thing that aspirants couldn't get around (from the extremely strong anti-enlightenment posture of the Chinese sect, this sentence can also be verified from the negative side). Strangulation is not entirely irrelevant. As practitioners of enlightenment, Beidou and Tong Zhe could have retired more dignifiedly, but Tong Zhe eventually became a liar who sucked other people's money, and some of Beidou's former core members became the praises of the system they once opposed , which makes the enlightenment who had been their banners also stained with embarrassing stains.

[1] https://watchalife.wordpress.com/2010/11/21/College students, don’t be victims of social change/

[2] "GQ Report｜The Disappearing Tong Zhe: Genius, CEO, Gambler", https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/eQ3tjf4Jg-wIVpKHo5zbRQ

[3] Xu Tie, "Tong Zhe in My Eyes - A Memory That The Times Can't Erase", https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/YGY3hDrtVEiMOHtoReAlsA

[4] However, sometimes politics requires imagination, and the logical path may not lead to the best results.

[5] Tong Zhe, "This is Tong Zhe", https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/tsp7R6Nhqic2Z1KOxYmTvQ