Venue: Room 105, Sanjiao, Peking University

Organizer: Huxiang Culture Research Association of Peking University

Speaker: Yao Guohua

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!

I am very grateful to the Huxiang Culture Research Association for giving me such an opportunity, and this is the fourth time that I have stood on the podium of Peking University. The publicity effect was the best, at the beginning, there were very few people, but thankfully, later, the number of people gradually increased. This time, I will give a series of lectures in different universities in Beijing, and the topic of today's lecture at Peking University is "The Concussion of China in a Hundred Years", which may be a little heavier and more in-depth, but it involves some key issues in my entire ideological context.

To put it more emotionally, I think that in the past hundred years, on the road to modernization of the Chinese, as a nation, there may be a big thinking trap in our entire ideological circle, including the thinking of those thought masters, including the mainstream thinking of today's scholars. I call this kind of thinking "concussive thinking." I will illustrate the characteristics of this kind of thinking starting with three concepts. In my books "The Founding of Culture" and "The Reconstruction of Universities", I mentioned that among the most basic concepts used by contemporary Chinese, there are ideological traps that most people are not aware of. This trap has largely hindered the Chinese's progress on the road to modernization. There may be some concepts that are the most basic and that most people do not suspect, but they are precisely traps. I think that all the problems in China today are related to these conceptual pitfalls.

I will talk about just three concepts today. The first concept is "feudal". For more than half a century, Chinese social science books and descriptions of Chinese history may not be able to be told without the word feudalism. For a long time, we positioned China as a traditional feudal society. However, the word feudalism, to put it bluntly, is a simple common-sense error. It was not until a few years ago that Mr. Li Shenzhi, a well-known thinker in China, exposed this mistake: For more than half a century, when Chinese used the word feudal, it was wrong in 99.9% of cases. What is wrong with such a keyword? Very simple. Feudalism, in Chinese, and even in Western parlance, means "fiefdom of land and establishment of princes". Qin Shi Huang abolished the Jingtian system and established a centralized system, which was the abolition of the feudal system. That is, as early as more than two thousand years ago, the feudal system perished. However, our textbook, the one that we can't memorize well, we can't get into high school, let alone university, tells us plainly that Qin Shi Huang established a feudal system.

And the truth of the matter is this: Qin Shi Huang eliminated the feudal system in China. This is simple historical common sense, but for decades, 99.9% of Chinese have never realized that they are using the word feudal wrong. Moreover, this is not only a question of the wrong word, if so, then it is easy to do, we agree that we have agreed to the custom of sang, and we have agreed that we will be able to recite the badger and the badger and the badger will be the badger and the badger will be the badger, and the badger will be the bad, and the >badger will be the bad, and the badger will be the bad, and the bad,

Where does this mistake come from? In fact, the centralized system and the feudal system were originally opposites, and to a large extent, since the time of Qin Shi Huang, the social situation in China has not been feudalism in terms of politics or economy, but closer to Western capitalism. If we compare China's 2,000-year-old system with that of the West, we will find that China is more like a Western capitalist society than a feudal society in the West. If you think about it, in China, the landlord's land can be bought and sold freely, the landlord can hire laborers, the rich can open a bank, and so on, all of which are extremely close to Western capitalist society. In fact, the so-called germ of capitalism has existed in China for more than 2,000 years. Capitalism in China did not sprout in the Ming and Qing dynasties, on the contrary, it began to sprout in China from Qin Shi Huang or even earlier, and China's industry and commerce have always been very developed.

Why do you say that for more than 2,000 years, our country has been in a feudal society? The mistake came from the Opium War more than a hundred years ago. The Chinese were defeated by the Westerners, and we don't know how we were defeated, we were knocked unconscious. In the beginning, we were defeated by the guns of the West, and later, we were defeated by the entire system of the West, and the Chinese civilization could not find the coordinates and could not see the direction clearly. At the end of the 19th century, China's entire civilization system collapsed, and the process of finding its place again began. It's like a person who is hit by something powerful and has a concussion, he doesn't know the direction, there is no time, there is no space, and the traditional civilization system and coordinate system have all collapsed. At this time, China found that it could only walk with the powerful force that was still active in front of it, and this state was a concussion. We have watched the movie, in the war, after someone is shocked by the sound of artillery, he loses his memory, he doesn't know who he is and where he comes from, what should he do? He also has the ability to sense planes, and in order for him to obtain the coordinates of his thoughts, he can only imitate the activities of the normal person in front of him. This is a concussion.

More than a hundred years ago, after the Chinese were completely defeated by Westerners, they began to believe that the whole world has a one-dimensional evolutionary direction and a single progressive routine. Westerners have walked faster than the Chinese on this road and have come to this level of development. And the civilization of all mankind will advance along this upward trend, but different nations are at different points in the chain of civilization ascent. The Chinese are here, the Westerners are in front of the Chinese, and the Cambodians, who are more backward than us, are behind the Chinese, and the Chinese minority Olunchun is further behind. That is to say, different peoples are moving forward in the same direction, but at different points in the same direction.

We know that in the early 20th century, there was an idea that had a great influence on the Chinese. Hu Shizhi's name reflects the tendency of the ideological trend at that time. The name Shizhi was chosen by Hu Shi according to Darwin's concept of "survival of the fittest". At that time, the influence of evolution in China was too great. Chinese are knocked unconscious, what should they do if they want to find the reason for their beatings and avoid being beaten again? There is an explanation that tells us that the Chinese are beaten because China is backward, and if they are not beaten, what should we do? Hurry up and follow that path and catch up with the West. This kind of thinking suddenly made the Chinese see hope, and the Chinese want to chase forward. At this time, the Chinese have found a positioning for themselves, but this positioning is based on the logic of historical unitary development, believing that every nation will evolve in the same direction. This evolutionary idea is based on social Darwinism, and since then we have had the idea that history is progressive, epochs are progressive, society is developing, and upward trends are the only direction.

This kind of concept, in fact, regards the path that Westerners have walked as the path that all mankind will inevitably experience, and Westerners today is our tomorrow, so what is our today? According to this logic, our today is, of course, the Westerners' yesterday. Westerners were a feudal society yesterday, and naturally, for more than 2,000 years, China has not developed because we are in a feudal society. When we say that China has been a feudal society for a long time, we do not proceed from experience, not from facts, not from China's situation, but from a simple logic: Westerners' yesterday is our today, and yesterday Westerners were in a feudal society, so we have also been in a feudal society for 2,000 years. In the case of concussion, people completely lose their memory, lose their view of time and space, and lose their self-coordinates, so feudalism, such an unreasonable concept, dominated China for nearly a century.

Behind this logic reinforces what we believe in the same reason: that human history is moving in the same direction. Today, of course, anyone with a modicum of biological knowledge knows that social Darwinism is actually a misunderstanding of Darwin. Darwinism simply does not agree that there is a unified direction for the evolution of life. Biological science tells us that human evolution presents a tree-like logic of development, and there is no such thing as human being at the highest level, apes at the next level, orangutans at the next level, monkeys at the next level, mammals in general, reptiles and small insects in the future. According to this logic, a terrible reasoning arises: we are humans today, apes yesterday, orangutans yesterday yesterday; The orangutan is not convinced, it says that it is an orangutan today, tomorrow it can evolve into an ape, and the day after tomorrow it will become a human; Not to be outdone, the monkey said that soon its tail would fall off and it would become an orangutan, and if it progressed further, it would one day become a man; The mouse is not willing to be a mouse for the rest of its life, and in the future, it will also be the best among animals, be a monkey, and finally evolve into a human; Even a pig is not willing to be slaughtered, and one day, it will become a human. Anyone with a modicum of biological knowledge will know that that's not what Darwin's theory of evolution says at all. He believes that there is no ultimate, highest state of evolution, but social Darwinism and the ordinary Chinese mode of thinking tell us that human development has a common direction and an ultimate state. Moreover, we know that primitive society, slave society, feudal society, capitalist society, socialist society, such a logic of development, a theory completely invented in the Stalin era, and something that was not Marx's original intention at all, dominates our thinking today. The error in the word feudalism does not lie in the error of the word itself, but in the logic strengthened behind the word: it tells us that the entire process of human civilization has a single coordinate system, which is based on the standards of the modern West, and in the final analysis, it is a kind of "Western-centrist" logic.

The second word, which we use all the time, and which we don't think is wrong, is "enlightenment." In fact, behind enlightenment, there is also a kind of thinking trap. If it is said that the trap behind the word feudalism can be understood by people as long as it is made a little bit, then the trap behind the word enlightenment is even more obscure. Including Mr. Li Shenzhi, whom I just mentioned, although he pointed out the error of the word feudalism, he also believes that the Chinese need enlightenment.

There are some very similar things in the word enlightenment and feudalism, and the pitfalls are quite similar. The enlightenment in the concept of the French and the British is very close to the meaning of the word enlightenment in Chinese, and they both refer to the fact that people are in a dark corner, and they want to obtain light, move towards civilization, and move from ignorance to enlightenment, which is called enlightenment. It's like a house, it's pitch black, we open the windows and let the light shine in, these lights symbolize intelligence, intelligence, civilization, advancement and wisdom, they shine on our dark hearts. However, when the French first coined the term enlightenment, in their consciousness, the wisdom used in enlightenment was not given to them by the outside world, nor was it the creation of the light of external civilization. Perhaps, for example, the great French Enlightenment thinker Voltaire would also envy the light of ancient Chinese civilization, but they did not believe that French culture itself was dark and had to wait for the transformation of Eastern civilization. I'll break it down later.

In the eighteenth century, many French thinkers of the Enlightenment agreed that China was a civilized country and that the Orientals were great. Voltaire once said that while we Europeans were still wandering in the forests of the Apennines, and still drinking blood, the ancient civilizations of the East had evolved to an unimaginable extent. The Emperor of China ruled the vast East in an orderly manner. China is like a family, harmonious, orderly, full of benevolence, and the homeland of freedom, equality, and fraternity is with the Chinese emperor. The emperor treats his subjects as kindly as a father treats his son. In the concept of many Enlightenment thinkers in France, the source of enlightenment is the light of the East, and the light of the Chinese shines on the West. But in fact, we should also realize that when the French were enlightened, when the British, Americans and Germans also longed for China, their yearning was fundamentally different from our yearning for the West today, looking forward to the enlightenment of China by Western civilization. What's the difference? The East that Europeans yearn for is an unattainable East, due to inconvenient transportation and poor information, so, their

The East, to a large extent, is the East imagined in one's own mind, the East imagined by oneself, not the real East. Because the actual East is too far away from them, they can only use their own ideas and make up an East. It's like if you fall in love with a beautiful girl for a moment, but you can't see her after that, but you often think about her, and even see her in your dreams, but the difference between her in your heart and the real her is getting bigger and bigger. It is precisely because of the distance that your imagination can be free, and you can make yourself full of subjective initiative, so that the idol you look forward to and the real her are two different things.

Returning to the discussion of the Enlightenment, Westerners worship the Orient and think that they are using Chinese civilization to transform Western culture, but in fact, they are transforming themselves. That is to say, the real Enlightenment is not that Westerners use the light from outside to illuminate themselves, but, on the contrary, they are awakening themselves. In other lectures, I have talked about the origin of Western culture, more often than not, the philosophy of ancient Greece, the faith of the Jews, and the civilization of Christianity. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, etc., were all the germination of a state of nature for Westerners. The real enlightenment of Westerners is not to illuminate them with the light from the outside, but to illuminate themselves with their own light and change themselves with the awakening of their inner wisdom.

It can be seen that the original meaning of the word enlightenment is not what we understand on the surface. In this regard, reference can be made to the meaning of the word enlightenment in German. It does not mean enlightenment in English, French, and Chinese. In German, enlightenment refers to the process of self-growth, development and self-improvement. This can be said to be a more true expression of the original meaning of enlightenment. However, today, the enlightenment that most Chinese understand is that the current situation of the Chinese is ignorant, and they urgently need to use the light from the outside to transform themselves. To put it bluntly, the enlightenment advocated by many intellectuals today is to transform the Chinese with the advanced ideas of the West. This kind of enlightenment is a tendency of wishful thinking, which is to instill so-called advanced ideas into our brains and let us move towards the light, and this kind of enlightenment is completely different from the original enlightenment of the West. In this case, man becomes a slave to the so-called light, subject to it, and in the presence of the so-called light, man is nothing more than a tool, an object to be transformed. This guiding ideology of enlightenment may have caused many passivity, beatings, and mediocrity in China today. Chinese people are becoming less and less creative, more and more losing their individuality, less and less initiative, and more and more collapsing their own vitality. The trap of the concept of "enlightenment" may be one of the root causes.

Okay, so I'm going to move on to the third word, "modernization." I am afraid, and even fewer people suspect that there is a trap behind the word modernization. However, the trap behind this word is obvious. Students who have a slight sense of Chinese should know, what is "hua"? It refers to not being something, but becoming something. Then, modernization means that the Chinese are not modern now, China is still in ancient times, and everyone here, this group of Peking University students on April 4, 2004, is not a modern person, but an ancient person. The current Chinese are not modern people, they can only be regarded as ancient people, and the ancient Chinese want to modernize, which is a time chaos. The concept of "modernization" is consistent with the concept of "feudalism", on which they rely. That is, they believe that the present of the Americans, Germans, French, and British can only be counted as the present, and they have the right to say: I am in the modern era, and the modern of the Chinese is only equivalent to their antiquity. This kind of thinking has led to us Chinese having to cancel our time coordinates.

By extension, I think there was an extremely dramatic contrast in the field of human thought in the twentieth century. What is it? At the beginning of the last century, in 1905, Albert Einstein launched an unprecedented revolution in the field of natural sciences. This revolution can be simply summarized as: the revolution of the concept of time in the scope of natural science, that is, the breaking of unified, absolute, and unary time coordinates, and transforming them into pluralistic time coordinates with an independent coordinate system for each material system. This means that time becomes a relative coordinate. Time cannot exist apart from the material system, and there is no absolute, unique coordinate system. Albert Einstein led the change from an absolute view of space-time to a relative view of space-time. However, in the same 20th century, in the field of human social life and in the field of social science, there was a transformation of the opposite. At first, most sociologists believed that each ethnic group had its own independent time coordinates, and each ethnic group had different historical chronological methods, such as the lunar calendar, the Gregorian calendar, the yellow calendar, and so on. Gradually, it evolved into a unified, unified, and absolute time coordinate. When the twentieth

When the last day came, people all over the world lamented it; When the sun first rises in the 21st century, people all over the world feel different. At this time, I have to ask, is this day really different from other days? In fact, it is not different, but it is the accidental setting of the Western chronology, which makes this day special. This view of time makes people all over the world chase the same time and space, which is completely opposite to the relative view of time and space in the field of natural science. A young man once asked Einstein that his theory of relativity was too abstract and profound, and Einstein gave a popular and interesting analogy: if you are faced with a long-winded, slurred old woman, a minute is like an hour; If you're with a loved one, an hour is as short as a minute. That's relative. It tells us that time is determined by the different states of each subject, and that there is no absolutely identical concept of time between different subjects. However, since the end of the 20th century, we have constructed the only space-time coordinates in the field of social life. This is where the concept of "modernization" comes from.

Some people are more radical on this point, such as a professor in the Department of Philosophy at National Taiwan University, named Wang Xiaobo, with whom I had a conversation. When I talked about the confusion behind these three words, Professor Wang agreed with many of my views, but he disagreed with me about the word enlightenment. He said that the word feudalism was imposed on the Chinese by the Third International of the Communist International; And the term modernization, which was imposed on the whole world by the CIA. I thought it was funny. Later, I looked it up and found that there was some factual basis for his claims. At that time, the Eastern Executive Department of the Comintern, in order to let North Korea, China, Vietnam and other countries follow him, said: Society is developing, it has grown up from primitive society, slave society, feudal society, capitalist society and socialist society, China is still a feudal society, Western society is already a capitalist society, higher than you, and we, the Soviet Union, have surpassed capitalism and reached the stage of socialism.

It's okay to follow them, but follow us and you can jump a level. As soon as China thought about it, since it was possible to skip one level, of course we would follow the Comintern. So we positioned ourselves as a feudal society, moving in the direction of socialism under the leadership of the big brother of the Soviet Union. There is such a thing about the word modernization. In the forties of the last century, there was an Asia Foundation in the United States, which still exists, which supported a Third World Congress. The conference was held in Seoul, South Korea, and the theme of the conference was modernization. Since this conference, the term modernization has been widely recognized by people all over the world. The backstage of the Asia Foundation was the CIA, and the intention of the United States at that time was to lead the world trend culturally. When the Spaniards conquered a place, they wanted to Iberianize it; When the English conquered a place, they wanted to make it Anglological; When the Dutch conquered a place, they wanted to Netherlandize it; When the French conquered a place, they wanted to French it; The Germans conquered a place and wanted to Germanize it. Later, the United States became the largest power in the world, and the Americans did not have much confidence to say that the whole world would be Americanized. Although the mainstream of the United States is Western culture, it is a hodgepodge after all. Therefore, he simply chose a word that is ostensibly universal, not Americanization, but modernization. That's how the term modernization comes from, and to put it bluntly, behind it is Americanization. Our scholars have done so much research on modernization and created so many standards, but in fact, they are all artificially imagined, and the basic foundation for Americans to lead the world trend is modernization.

Chinese thinkers, represented by Hu Shizhi, took the lead in accepting the term modernization and then combined it with the word enlightenment, so that the Chinese silently accepted, imitated and learned from the state of Westerners at that time, eager to integrate with the West. Today, we don't have more time to discuss the pitfalls of modernization. To put it simply, the trend of globalization is unequal, unjust, and there is a distinction between the center and the periphery, and the more you follow others, the more you fall into the domination of other people's discourse systems.

The term modernization, again, is based on the single logic emphasized by social Darwinism, on a radical misunderstanding of Darwinism. The misunderstanding of the use of the three words feudalism, enlightenment and modernization lies in the fact that we Chinese have been in a state of time confusion for more than a hundred years. What is temporal confusion? To put it simply: our historical memory is blurred, we don't have our own independent time coordinates, we only know to follow others. Such a situation is what I call the ideological concussion of a century of China.

An important figure in Western philosophy, Immanuel Kant, had an analysis of human knowledge in his thoughts. How is our knowledge structure structured? Kant has a very classic description. He believes that our human knowledge is neither simply from experience nor entirely a priori, but the product of a combination of a priori and experience. Pure experience cannot be knowledge; Purely a priori, likewise impossible to produce knowledge. In experience and a priori, Kant deals with the description of time and space. He said that when we experience the material world as an object, each of us is born with a priori coordinates of time and space. And this a priori space-time coordinates are the premise for the occurrence of knowledge.

Kant further argues that concepts such as cause, effect, and possibility cannot exist in the real world, and that they are all products a priori. Time and space, too, are absent from the material world, but only exist in the minds of each person. To put it more clearly, people will realize that time and space, and that there is no time and space in objective objects. The spatio-temporal coordinates of human beings, just like Descartes' coordinate system, plus the inclusion of chaotic experience, give us our memories, feelings, and impressions. Memory, feeling, impression, etc., are further processed with our conceptual system to form our rational knowledge. Kant tells us that the human mind has a premise, and this premise is the spatio-temporal coordinates of the individual, the innate conceptual mode of the individual. Of course, in the twentieth century, Piaget's psychological theory tells us that Kant's so-called personal space-time coordinates are not brought out of the mother's womb, but are naturally formed in the process of the conception of the individual's thoughts. Although this is a revision of Kant's theory, it still does not deny one of Kant's premises: our human knowledge is not simply experience, but contains a priori factors, and one of the manifestations of a priori lies in the individual's concept of time and space.

The Chinese concept of time and space has been lost, which means that we have lost the ability to think independently. We can only simply copy and apply the conceptual system, historical viewpoint, and space-time coordinates of Westerners. A nation that has completely lost its own concept of time and space is, of course, a nation that has been completely concussed. For more than 100 years, there have been few real thinkers in China. I have another topic, about the comparison between Jews and Chinese, at that time, we will find that China and Jews are the greatest peoples in the world, but when the Chinese face the Jews, there is one thing that requires us to collectively feel inferior. That is, in the past hundred years, the Jews have had the most outstanding figures, all the trend-setting figures, in any field, and there is hardly a single such person in China, except perhaps *. There is not a doctrine named after the Chinese, there is not a single idea named after the Chinese, and there is no scientific achievement developed by the Chinese, who can rightly say to the world: Follow me! I'm the most advanced. Literary masters and thought masters like Lu Xun can only be here

China is widely recognized, and it has little influence on world trends. Perhaps, among the Chinese, who have led the world trend, only a flash in the pan *.

As the most populous nation in the world today, China has lost its voice in the ocean of world thought. Why is this so? Because the Chinese are collectively in a state of concussion. The Chinese's ability to think independently has disappeared, and according to Kant, the Chinese cannot be thoughtful. In fact, it is also true. Today, whenever we talk about an important idea, we see it as a set pattern and dissect it without introspectively. Today, there is no science in China, and Chinese science is copying the traditional scientific knowledge of the West, and we think that this kind of knowledge is science, but in fact it is not. Thought is not thought, but thinking. Thought is the result, the established state, and thinking is the process, the active state. Going deeper into this question will lead to many of my reflections. One of the things, I think, is that science in China today is completely dead. The path to rise that many economists in China envision is in fact the dream of the unclear-headed. Many sociologists and reformers in China are shouting about constitutional reform, but in fact they are also in a state of concussion, not at all

Know when and where you are. Thank you.

Education in China is even worse. Not long ago, a very radical scholar said that China's Ministry of Education should simply be abolished. Because the word education is itself a trap. Education means that a certain subject stands high above and instills the so-called truth, ideas, and knowledge into everyone. This kind of education is harmful. True education should respect the educated, who are also the subjects, and they grow themselves. And our education seems to be to instill the so-called bright, advanced, and correct things into blank, ignorant, ignorant, and numb minds, that is, enlightenment in the concept of universal Chinese. This kind of education is undoubtedly terrible. The radical thinker above said that the Ministry of Education should be changed to the Ministry of Learning. Live and learn to be old. However, it turned out that there are few clean words in China, and learning this word is even worse, worse than education. Why? Learning is originally the meaning of imitation, that is, there is a ready-made conclusion, model, and model in front of me, and I copy it, imitate it, and use it, which is learning.

Xi is just an exercise, so that when you copy and use it, you will be more proficient. China's traditional culture for more than 2,000 years has been continued through this concept and action of learning. This kind of learning has caused the stability of Chinese civilization, but also caused the stagnation of civilization and the loss of its own vitality and creativity. Chinese almost only know learning, we start learning from kindergarten, all the way to middle school, university, to doctorate, to obtain a postdoctoral degree, and to learn old, but we do not think that this kind of learning is problematic, there is a huge trap behind it, we have completely become slaves to the so-called truth, conclusions, models, textbooks, we have become passive objects. For more than 100 years, there has been no fundamental change in this model, except that we have shifted from learning from our ancestors to learning from Westerners, and we aim to be in line with international standards. This mode of thinking obliterates our innate creativity, life impulse, autonomy, and imagination. This state of affairs has caused all the rigidity and mediocrity in China today. Don't Westerners learn? he

We also learn. However, they are both learning and studying. Study is not equal to learning in our concept, it refers to the search for rules, formulas, laws, etc. without ready-made conclusions, principles and answers, it is more of a kind of exploration, research and discovery. And what we Chinese lack is this string. If this state of affairs does not change, it is too absurd for China to talk about building a world-class university, and only people who are in a state of concussion will raise such unrealistic slogans. Actually, our study in China is combined with another thing. What is it? Albert Einstein once said: We all think that knowledge is the most important, but in fact, there is something more important than knowledge and conclusions, that is, human imagination. By extension, this kind of imagination contains human imagination, creativity, passion, life impulse, revolutionary spirit, subjective initiative and endless curiosity, which are precisely the most important things for human beings. And most of today's Chinese have forgotten precisely these, our education, staying at the stage of learning knowledge, has cut off the precious things that people are born with, and passively accepted the civilization established by others.

There are so many areas in Chinese society today that are completely mired in the mud of using what others have as models. Some of the things that we are often proud of are actually our shame, have you ever thought about it? For example, we think that the Great Wall is great because it is said that the Great Wall is a sight that humans can see with the naked eye in space. As I have already discussed in my books "The Founding of Culture" and "The Reconstruction of Universities", this statement is absurd. Later, a reader wrote to me and asked me why I had been able to recognize the absurdity of this claim before Yang Liwei went into space. The reason is simple, it's a matter of common sense. After a simple scientific investigation, we will find out the truth. But why should we deceive ourselves? Because we always stay in this kind of thinking: foreigners say that something is great in us, that is the real greatness. The praise of foreigners can increase our sense of pride.

The same thing happened at other places of interest. As you know, Xi'an has the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of Qin Shi Huang, known as the "Eighth Wonder of the World". What is the "Eighth Wonder"? There is such a thing. At that time, when the French prime minister, who is now President Jacques Chirac, visited China, the Chinese leaders took him to visit the Terracotta Warriors and Horses, which had just been excavated, and the Chinese were very proud, although they wanted to take this opportunity to show off to the French. Faced with such a spectacular scene, Chirac was also suppressed, and as soon as the ground collapsed, he came up with a sentence: "This is really the eighth wonder of the world!" But he immediately realized that he had made a huge mistake. Why? His statement is very similar to the statement that a Chinese envoy attracted the king of Yelang when he went to the country of Yelang more than 2,000 years ago. King Yoro asked the messenger where he came from, and asked which of his countries was bigger than Yoro's country. He can be said to be arrogant and arrogant, so the idiom of Yelang's arrogance was born. We laughed at the King of Yelang and laughed for two thousand years. If the Chinese of today were the Chinese of 2,000 years ago, the Chinese would laugh at Sheila

Gram, laugh for two thousand years. Chirac said that the Terracotta Warriors and Horses are the eighth wonder of the world, and that they are looking at the world with the narrow eyes of Westerners. During the ancient Greek period, a traveler discovered seven places to see along the Mediterranean coast, calling them the "Seven Wonders of the World". These seven wonders, if compared with the ancient Chinese miracles of civilization, are simply inconspicuous. However, since then, whenever Westerners have discovered something else, they casually say that this is the eighth wonder of the world. Standing on the historic land of China, facing the magnificent and strange Chinese ruins, Chirac realized that he had made a mistake similar to Yelang's arrogance, and he immediately changed his words: "Oh, no, no, no, no, if you want me to see it, this is simply the first in the world." In fact, Chirac did not have to change his words at all, because the Chinese standing in front of him were people who had completely lost their own time and space coordinates and the ability to think independently, and these local officials thought that the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang had been ranked as "foreigner", which was already very remarkable. Since then, the eighth wonder of the world, as a synonym for the terracotta warriors, has been widely spread. Xi'an's most conspicuous banner reads: "Welcome to Xi'an, home to the Eighth Wonder of the World!" "What an honor is this, what a shame! The Three Gorges Project in Hubei and Sanxingdui in Sichuan are also vying for the title of "Eighth Wonder of the World."

We are trapped in a Western-style single coordinate, and this coordinate does not have any universality at all, why should we hold on to it and use it to locate ourselves and our own cultural wealth? We had a terrible concussion. As we mentioned earlier, in the process of moving towards modern civilization, Westerners took the Eastern civilization as a model, but this model was geographically too far away from them, almost in another world where it was impossible to operate, and it was too difficult to obtain the prototype of the model, so they could only imagine an "Eastern civilization" based on their own experience, which was actually created. For example, the Chinese court envisioned in Turandot has little to do with the actual Chinese court; The China conceived in "One Thousand and One Nights" does not correspond to the actual situation in China. Westerners took China's four great inventions and used their own theoretical science to make a radical transformation so that they were no longer the same as they were. Lu Xun made this more clear: Cai Lun invented papermaking, which the Chinese used to burn the underworld coin, but the Westerners used it to carry out religious reform. There are too many such examples

。 As soon as Chinese things arrived in the West, they were turned into things with other meaning by Westerners with creativity. However, when today's Chinese accept and imitate the West, they feel that it is too easy, too comfortable, and too beautiful. Whoever goes abroad and lives in the world of foreigners, who becomes a disciple of foreigners, as soon as he returns to China, he will be noticed by everyone, and he will have the right to speak. This kind of thinking is actually a kind of concussive thinking. (Applause.)

For example, in sports competitions, we use the ready-made rules of Westerners to compete with Westerners, we can indeed surpass Westerners in skills in many projects, and we get more and more championship honors, but it is difficult for us Chinese to have a game, a rule, a way of playing, so that the West accepts, we can only be based on the established rules of the game of Westerners,

Chase people in skill. In some other technological aspects, we can also catch up with the West. For example, if the World Trade Center collapses, the Chinese can build many World Trade Towers and surpass the original ones. But excuse me, is this really exceeding? No. We can only surpass others in the tangible appearance, in the control of the model of Westerners, and in terms of substantive theories and principles, we cannot surpass. Technically, it is possible to build a tower twice as tall as the original World Trade Tower, but no American would do such a stupid thing, because such a tall building is not cost-effective in terms of economic value or comfort. Where have all the companies that build high-rise buildings in the United States moved? Moved to the Asia-Pacific region.

There are high-rise buildings in Taipei, high-rise buildings in Kaohsiung, high-rise buildings in Hong Kong, high-rise buildings in Malaysia, high-rise buildings in Singapore, high-rise buildings in Beijing, and high-rise buildings in Shanghai. Moreover, everyone is secretly competing to build a high-rise building that ranks among the best in the world. Why compete like this? Because our independent way of thinking has completely collapsed, and we want to grow up, we want to rush forward in other people's patterns, and we can only fight according to other people's visible indicators. This competition has no cultural significance, only a numerical significance. Including many of today's economists competing for GDP and playing the numbers game; Many people are desperately chasing to break the Guinness Book record. All of this is a mistake in traditional thinking. We have erased the soul of Western civilization and cannot understand its essence, and we cannot see the soul of our own civilization, we just run behind the ass of Westerners, which is undoubtedly a concussive pathology.

Another surprising thing is that it contains a startling number, which is also said to be derived from ******. China spends $30 billion a year on government officials traveling abroad. Of course, the $30 billion will not include personal funds, but will all be at public expense. What is the concept of $30 billion? That's more than China has to spend on education and health care combined. We know that Columbus went through all the hardships and thought that he had reached the East, but in fact it was nothing more than a false East; Marco Polo went through a lot of hardships before he came to the East and experienced the face of the Yuan Dynasty. When they returned to the West, they all brought into play the cultural power they relied on to make them stronger. And today, China has so many officials that it can easily reach the West. What they have acquired is the most accurate knowledge of the West, and they have accepted the modern civilization of the West without distortion, and this imitation can only lead to something stiff and soulless. In short, today's Chinese are in a concussive state that has lost their independent thinking ability and space-time coordinates.

The only way to change this concussion state may be to return to some kind of thinking of Liang Qichao, Cai Yuanpei, Lu Xun and even *. Chinese must rebuild their belief in the inner world, and a cultural movement to change the thinking patterns and values of Chinese people and clean up the spiritual world of Chinese is the right choice to change the status quo. In my writings, I put forward my own constructive opinions, I do not agree with the current so-called ****, I do not agree with the ****, I oppose the thinking of convergence, I do not think that the implementation of political reform is a panacea for the development of China. The only way out for China is a Reformation, or a Renaissance, or an Enlightenment, or a university movement, as in Germany, as the West once did. The university movement was carried out in China in the last century, such as Cai Yuanpei's construction of Peking University and the reconstruction of Southwest Associated University. The Chinese must build a cultural center, a special cultural zone, within themselves. The first time I stood on the podium of your university, I spoke about the theme of the 21st century university movement, and I emphasized that China should build culture

Special Economic Zones, not just special economic zones, cultural establishment is our ultimate way out.

That's all for today's topic, thank you! (Applause.)