China's college generation is likely NOT what you think it is.

Your author had over eight years full-time experience as a professor in mainland China and shares with you a student poem as a parting gift.

Please bear with the long-winded introduction to a poem from a young lady in mainland China, non de plume Crystal. Crystal wrote it during the middling end of the Covid hysteria in mainland China, and it was published shortly afterwards. The poem has been translated into English by a (former) colleague of mine, JF, who is a highly qualified poet and translator in his own right.

It serves as a parting gift since Crystal is a former student of both JF (the translator) and your author, and your author has ended his formal connections with China.

             Photo of a previous graduating cohort. Crystal is not in this photo.

The Board of Trustees can now Revoke my PhD

Your author no longer has an appointment at the rank of Professor in the College of Liberal Arts for certain university in mainland China. After nearly six years on the mainland, during the Covid pandemic, I was living in a nearby Southeast Asian nation and teaching remote (online). In October 2022, I was ordered to return to campus by 10 January 2023.

I resigned my position instead. I had watched the first bio-security state fully emerge. I would not willing integrate — the Borg is real, the economic comfort and security it offers an illusion. You die with your alleged estate recycled to the medical-industrial complex. You sacrifice your time and energy to have your living corpse exploited as your final obligation. You chose safety over liberty, dependence on the system over personal responsibility. You belong to them, body and soul. So be it.

I had years of scrimping, saving, investing, and relying on NO governments for support — not the USA, and most certainly not China. Fiscal responsibility is good. Savings, not debt, make freedom viable. A personal and national lesson we have largely forgotten. So I effectively bought out my contract — the remaining years of my life belong to me. I can meet my survival needs for years to come.

Finished up my duties mid-January 2023. I did forfeit some personal property still on campus. As well as some back pay (which I apparently needed to arrive in person to collect. Whatever). All worth it — and more. Ex-academic. My current quality of life, which includes my personal freedom, is ludicrously improved.

A CCTV display using the facial-recognition system Face in Beijing.                                                            (Gilles Sabrié / The Washington Post). Cited under Fair Use. 

Teaching the Western Tradition in China

Intellectual freedom as a token American academic in China, curiously enough, was quite a different matter. We — the students and I — discussed readings by such classic Western thinkers as John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Hayek; important contemporaries such as Shoshana Zuboff, Esther Duflo, Joshua Greene, Thomas Piketty, and Victor Davis Hanson. Beyond economic and political theory, our topics included AI, bioethics, environmental ethics, and more. In two other courses, your author walked the students (English or Chinese language majors, generally) through basic text-mining, building data dashboards from the Gapminder data repository, and more.

These young women and men — as the non-binary phenomena has yet to take hold in China — were neither zombies nor robots nor brain-washed ideologues. They had their biases — as we all do —but were generally both curious and critically open-minded. Likewise, they more typically tolerated or even tuned out the relentless CCP messaging. True believers or mindless repeaters were very few and far in between. This was one (and so only one sample thereof a) Chinese university in reality — but not the Chinese campuses so featured in the American MSM.

       A published student dashboard from my Telling Stories with Data course.

One wonders if these MSM portrayals of rigidly indoctrinated and highly regimented Chinese college student populations are not confession by projection: confessions of the fantasies our power elite have for our own universities, and confessions of numerous local actualities where woke student-mobs have displaced critical reasoning, empiricism, and the study of history with ideologically charged narratives of victimization which allow for no dissent or questioning.

For a start on that latter point, please recall how Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying got their start in podcasting. To take the next step, please read Heather MacDonald (2018), The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. But whatever.

Preface to the Poem, “Simply One Flapping of the Wings”

The poem below, “Simply One Flapping of the Wings” does not explicitly criticize the CCP lockdowns, Covid policies, etc. It would never have been published in a local literary magazine, to start; but also, such bluntness is typically not a virtue in Chinese literature. Moreover, in fact, such direct statements become curiously ambiguous — weakened, mysterious — as the context fades.

Rather than making an outright political statement, the writer will more typically create a mood, even an environment. The reader enters into the experience, even if at times obliquely, immersing.

It is this sharing of experience, this vicarious to visceral knowing, which leads a heighted understanding, a differing political awareness. Again, whereas the Covid lockdowns are not explicitly mentioned in this poem, their effects are undeniably exposed:

All of a sudden, it grabbed and gripped every form of life;
Even the babbling infants
And the kittens and puppies that wanted to seek some warmth under the cars
Failed to get free.

The poem is also covertly but strongly critical of the CCP’s relentless efforts to dominate all discourse and hence exert influence — if not control — over all aspects of life. The poet shows her generation offering resistance, creating solidarity, but not living in denial about the CCP’s effectiveness:

With fair play, we have been pulling the cobweb covering each of us,
One pull from you, another pull from me,
And a third from another.
We simply keep pulling and pulling,
Until we are habitually blind to the existence of the web.

But the poet is not blind. If the reader is familiar with the famous speech “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace (2005) —from which a brief excerpt is provided near end of this post, Crystal is demonstrating the

“real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us.”

Although both JF and your author doubtless wish we could take credit for this as her professors, in truth we can at best encourage and clear obstacles, create opportunities. The credit goes to the student who has surpassed her teachers.

This is a quietly heroic poem by Crystal, a former student of both JF the translator and your author. A young lady striving for internal coherence beyond dogma or self-pity, finding or creating meaning despite the power-mad absurdities largely dictating her public reality, and convinced beyond reason but not beyond hope that change will come at last — led by the younger generation (hers) and those still in their cradles:

The long and lingering winter,
Cannot stop the steps of the early spring.
The global wailing
Is being interwoven with the sobbing of the newborn babies.

The poem’s ending might not please those American readers with short attention spans and simplistic notions of progress. The poet’s hoped for renewal requires engagement, not “stillness,” but also NOT the surrender of one’s self to a prefabricated moral tribe, to a politized collective already known to, covertly or overtly supported by, and hence being mobilized for advantage by the elites in power.

This is not about surrendering to a side, and then demonizing the other side. This is not about being cannon fodder in a Civil War for which you are unprepared and will not benefit from. This is not American identity politics.

In contrast to the surrender of self to a collective, an ongoing demand in China and elsewhere, the poet calls for “solitude:” the affirmation of an individual existence, the delay between stimulus and reaction which allows for choice, for response. Which defeats the crass, simplistic, but powerful manipulation of identity politics. By recapturing and asserting the self, one gains the possibility as mentioned earlier in the poem of true solidarity — of voluntarily associating with and connecting with other selves to further shared goals and concerns:

The spring splendor in all the city
Can only prosper in solitude,
And perish in stillness.

Solitude from the overreaching and relentless demands of the CCP, along with the mainland Chinese work-yourself-to-death ethic; but an end to the stifling stillness of lockdowns and seemingly endless top-down control. The authorities demanded that the students always be kept busy busy busy, on drill for this and that; as professors, many of us insisted that the students needed time to think, even time to create.

In contemporary American culture, we have vilified and demonized “individualism.” But “solitude” is about having that personal, psychological, and social boundary-space which makes decision-making meaningful, possible. Crystal reminds us that forced assimilation into a group, mob, or tribe is one of society’s ultimate betrayals of our shared humanity. At some point, we either exercise choice or lose all choices.

My former Chinese students give me hope for the future, even as the CCP does not. Even as our American leadership does not. It has indeed been my honor to work with such young women and men for eight and a half years, the majority of that time in person and in mainland China, with only the Covid-craze online and remote.

Without further ado:

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Simply One Flapping of the Wings

The wings of darkness flapped,
For one time, a second time,
And another,
Flapping and flapping…

The heart of darkness
Opened its eyes but slightly,
And the cobweb lying on the ceiling was stirred and stunned out of its dreams,
Then drifting down,
Softly, slowly, in an indolent security.

Right before its fall unto the ground,
All of a sudden, it grabbed and gripped every form of life;
Even the babbling infants
And the kittens and puppies that wanted to seek some warmth under the cars
Failed to get free.

Not until then,
Did we truly come to realise
The very frequency of that flapping.

We, the ones who failed to break away,
Started to question the variety of deities in our hearts,
But how come those past prayers
Had become the melted glaciers, evaporating into thin air?

For the abrupt assumption of devoutness,
Salvation came a bit too late, with lethargy.
For the crimes and sins committed by the human species,
Absolution has long arrived at its expiry date.

The responses of the Providence have been overwhelmed in hurricanes and tempests,
And even the vast land that has been a silent and selfless servant,
Cannot afford the time to sing its lamentation.

We take to the street to get some help,
Dragging the exposed bodies deeply bound in the cobweb,
And through its small spots of space,
The way ahead is reluctantly revealed.

No one can see clearly the face of another,
No one can ever forge ahead in a straight line.
On the way, everyone is linked with kinship,
And each one is locked in enmity.

Occasionally some clowns
Come to add some untimely merriment
To the stagnant metropolis.
They dance comically in the cobweb,
To the accomplishment of our tightly caught lips,
Which try hard to open, unwilling to let the scarce laughters go unnoticed.

On the way, losing the sight of our Mother,
We can do nothing but huddle back into the swaddles of the old days.
Weeping is the weapon we can wield,
But Mother, together with Destiny,
Can no longer hear anything.

Anxiety abounds in the refrigerator,
So the windows are opened to set free the odour of rottenness.
Gusts of wind pour in from outside,
But we are still careless and callous, either about the chill,
Or about the sultriness.

With fair play, we have been pulling the cobweb covering each of us,
One pull from you, another pull from me,
And a third from another.
We simply keep pulling and pulling,
Until we are habitually blind to the existence of the web.
Over time, the fair play becomes a funny game to kill time.

Demonstrations go on and on in the streets;
Even closed windows cannot keep out the tolling of the bells,
Which, like cheerleaders, by celebrating our play and games,
Ceases to be unpleasant to the ears.

Standing up to press the button to flush the toilet,
And staring at the weird and fragmented whirlpool,
Whose vortex is the very centre of this world,
And spreads its smell.

Who else will ever believe,
that the homo sapiens have long before shut up their eyes,
And held their breath.

The long and lingering winter,
Cannot stop the steps of the early spring.
The global wailing
Is being interwoven with the sobbing of the newborn babies.

The spring splendor in all the city
Can only prosper in solitude,
And perish in stillness.

By Crystal, published late 2022, Guangdong Province, CHINA. Translation by JF.

---

To except two passages from Foster’s speech “This is Water” (2005):

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

…

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

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Your author will include below the original Chinese, but please again note that JF, who provided the above English translation, is an accomplished poet and translator in his own right. For literary matters, for which the Chinese language has both numerous conventions and nuances, please trust JF to out-perform Google translate every time.

只不過是翅膀扇動了一下

黑色的翅膀扇動了
一下，两下
又一下
扑棱 扑棱

黑色的心
微微睜開开雙眼
躺在天花板的蜘蛛網也被震醒
輕輕地，緩緩地，若無其事地
飘了下來

就在快要落地的時候
突然，紧紧地罩住每個生命
連咿呀學语的孩童
躲在車底取暖的小貓小狗
都未能幸免

直到這時
我們才真正感受到了
翅膀扇動的頻率

掙脫未果的我們
質問心中的神明
過往的禱告
為何成了融化的雪水，蒸發在空气裏
對於突如其来的虔誠
庇護也來得措手不及，略顯得無力

對於人類的罪行
赦免早已過了有效期

上帝的回應淹没在狂風暴雨裏
連往日默默奉獻的大地
也陷入昏迷
來不及訴說自己的冤屈

我們到街上求救
拖著裹在蜘蛛網裏裸露的身體
透著小小的網格
好不容易纔看見眼前的路

没有誰能看得清誰的脸
没有誰能筆直地前行
路上的每個人都是親人
每個人也都是敵人

有时也會有小丑
給沉悶的城市
貼上些许不合時宜的歡樂
小丑在蜘蛛網裏滑稽地跳舞
我們努力張開被勒紧的雙唇
也不願放過這來之不易的笑聲

我們和母親走散了
只好蜷縮回舊日的襁褓裏
哭啼是我們的武器
可是母親連同命運
都聽不見任何聲音

冰箱裏囤满了焦慮
打開窗户，讓腐爛的氣味散出去一點
一陣陣風从窗外迎面扑來
我們依然感受不到寒冷
也不覺得悶热

我們公平地撕扯彼此身上的蜘蛛網

你一下，我一下
又一下
直到習慣了網的存在
也繼續互相撕扯
時間長了
倒成了一个打發時間的遊戲

大街上無休止的示威遊行
關上窗都能聽到的丧鍾
都像在為我們的遊戲摇旗助威呐喊
變得不再刺耳

从馬桶站起來，按下按鈕
盯著那怪異又破碎的漩涡
滚動的那个瞬間
就是這個世界的中心
散發出這個世界的氣味

又有誰會相信？
人類早已閉上眼睛
屏住呼吸

長冬的滯留
無法阻擋初春的步伐
遍地的哀嚎裏
夾雜着新生兒的啜泣
滿城的春色
也只能寂寞地生長
再安静地凋零

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