The humble are the smartest, the noble the dumbest Read Tiananmen: Intellectuals and the Revolution in China

Ritual cannibalism. Qu Qiubai's mother committed suicide when he was only sixteen years old.

The reason for her suicide is unclear. The author analyzes the background at the time and believes that although she married a son of a traditional landlord, her husband was lazy and spendthrift by nature. She worked tirelessly to raise six children, and to serve her half-paralyzed mother-in-law. The Qu family is now in debt, and the relatives of the husband's family keep scolding Qu Qiubai's mother for not knowing how to manage the house and ignoring filial piety. Until one day, she couldn't take it anymore.

The young Qu Qiubai may collapse and be at a loss, but from this, he began his legendary life. He studied hard and got the opportunity to study in the Soviet Union. During the Soviet Union, he served as a reporter and Russian translator. After returning to China, in 1927, after Chen Duxiu stepped down in charge of Chiang Kai-shek's Shanghai purges, he became the head of the Politburo. At just 28 years old, he became the supreme leader of the Communist Party.

But the political climate within the party is changing so quickly. During this period, the inner-party struggle was fierce. The leaders went up and down, and Qu Qiubai was powerless to control his own destiny. In 1935 in the Jiangxi Soviet area, Qu Qiubai stayed behind to face Chiang Kai-shek's army of encircling and suppressing the Communist Party in accordance with the party's decision. On June 18 of the same year, he was executed at the age of 36.

Can we say that Qu Qiubai is the epitome of contemporary Chinese intellectuals? Tried to burn, but almost no trace is left now. If it weren't for the prevalence of nationalism in contemporary China, and the popularity of popular dramas in recent years, I am afraid that today's Chinese people would not remember this former party elite very much.

How should we evaluate Chinese intellectuals today? In the contemporary era of public stigma, can we find answers from China a hundred years ago?

Shi Jingqian extracted the appearances of several intellectuals from before and after the founding of the Republic of China to 1980, trying to depict the struggle of Chinese intellectuals in the past century in a panoramic manner. The story begins with Kang Youwei, and passes through Lu Xun, Qu Qiubai, Xu Zhimo, Wen Yiduo, Ding Ling, and finally Wei Jingsheng in 1980.

Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai are the most touching. Kang and Sun Yat-sen competed with each other for overseas resources. Although both were losers in the end, Kang Youwei died in the midst of his eternal recollection of the Qing Dynasty, but Sun was indomitable until he died and was still mediating the warlords in Beijing. Ding Ling is the epitome of the standard intellectuals under the party's rule. She was a progressive youth at first, and became a literary and artistic elite after the founding of New China. However, during the first literary prison Hu Feng case after the founding of New China, she fought with comrades in the Communist Party and eventually fell to The end of exile in the Great Northern Wilderness, followed by imprisonment, just escaped the most difficult famine and Cultural Revolution that followed, and ended in a happy death.

All are losers. No matter Kang Youwei, Lu Xun, Qu Qiubai or Ding Ling.

Before the party ruled China, everyone dared to write articles criticizing the current affairs, but 49 years later, the Chinese people stood up and became silent. The major intellectuals survived because of their attachment to the Party, and no good works have appeared since then. Under the watchful eyes of the party, the only thing left is to use the articles published in the past to expose the wounds of former comrades in arms. It seems to be subdued on the surface, but there is always a shallow undercurrent underneath, bursting out from time to time, and criticism from time to time.

"The humble are the smartest, and the noble are the stupidest" - Mao Zedong, at the Second Session of the Eighth Communist Party Congress in 1958, on the eve of the Great Leap Forward

The group of Chinese intellectuals has always been the focus of research for hundreds of years, because they are not only one in a hundred, or even one in a million. This group of people has been given the hope that they can lead the people to get rid of poverty and ignorance. But now it seems that this group of people has little effect, neither improving the material life of the people nor changing the rigid political structure. Smart people will obediently become the party's tools, they will write whatever they want, and they will dig into the bottom of others if they want to attack them.

But there are still a few stupid ones who are always on the fringes, always concerned with the fate of the little ones. This happens to be the most sensitive point of the party, so it is locked in the major propaganda channels and cannot escape the fate of being criticized by the politically correct party. But if intellectuals are integrated into the mainstream, they are only the mouthpieces of the party.

But if you don't enter the system, you will never have a chance. As a reared intellectual, although he was used as a spearman, his life was safe and he had hope of achieving his ideal of governing the country. How can you do great things when you are not an official? An ideal "leftist in the study" like Lu Xun is simply one in a thousand. He can support himself by writing and dare to criticize current affairs. But on the other hand, he died early, and did not come to catch up with the waves of purges after the founding of New China.

Wei Jingsheng, who was arrested in 1979, is the last character in Shi Jingqian's pen. When the book was completed in 1980, the author naturally had no way of knowing that Wei Jingsheng would become a bargaining chip in the Sino-US transaction, and eventually went into exile in the United States, and had little influence on his homeland.

Intellectuals who have danced with shackles for hundreds of years, and intellectuals at the crossroads, how should they choose?

A weak horse carrying several thousand catties of shovel, walked up the steep hillside, and climbed up step by step. It was impossible to go back, and it was really incompetent to go further. That's how I felt when I was in charge of political leadership. The insatiable fatigue left me permanently feeling an indescribable weight. The mental and political burnout made me long for a "sweet" rest, so that my mind went numb, and I stopped thinking of all kinds. After I was expelled from the Politburo at the Fourth Plenary Session of the Communist Party of China in January 1931, my mental state was indeed a state of "emptiness in my heart", and it remains the same to this day.

......

at last……

Gorky's "Forty Years", "The Life of Klimo Samotin", Turgenev's "Lu Ding", Tolstoy's "Anna Karinina", Chinese Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q" ", the contradictory "Shake", and Cao Xueqin's "A Dream of Red Mansions", all can be read again.

Chinese tofu is also very delicious, the world's first.

farewell!

"Superfluous Words" - Qu Qiubai's Confessions in Prison