Good things.
传承
What is worth keeping.
Good things
What is worth keeping.
Lead essays & audio editions · 2
essay · Episode 5What the Flame Could Not BurnAncient poetry hidden under floorboards, hand-copied novels read by kerosene lamps, and flatbed pedicab drivers pedaling into gunfire. Why human decency survived the totalitarian machine.▶ Listenessay · Episode 12The Courage of the Solitary Voice: From Scar Literature to the Underground RiverA mimeograph cranked in a freezing Beijing courtyard, a banner unrolled over Sitong Bridge, and blank sheets of white paper raised in the dark. Why an apparatus of a million censors still trembles before a single citizen who refuses to recite.▶ ListenThe Communist Manifesto publishedIn February 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto in London, proclaiming that all human history was the history of class struggles and declaring that the proletariat had nothing to lose but their chains. Seventy years would pass before this revolutionary pamphlet arrived in China, where it was embraced by radical intellectuals searching for a weapon to overthrow imperialism and rebuild their shattered country.Read →New Youth founded, the New Culture MovementIn September 1915, Chen Duxiu founded Youth Magazine (soon renamed New Youth) in Shanghai, launching the New Culture Movement that waged an uncompromising war against Confucian traditionalism in the name of Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science. The journal revolutionized modern Chinese thought, laying the intellectual foundation for the May Fourth explosion and the rapid radicalization that gave birth to Chinese communism.Read →The May Fourth MovementOn 4 May 1919, over three thousand university students surged into Tiananmen Square to protest the Versailles Treaty's transfer of German concessions in Shandong to Japan, burning the residence of a pro-Japanese minister and igniting a nationwide wave of student strikes, merchant boycotts, and worker walkouts that permanently transformed Chinese political consciousness.Read →Marxist study societies formThroughout 1920, radical students and young intellectuals formed Marxist study societies in Beijing, Shanghai, Changsha, and Wuhan, transitioning from vague cultural debates to systematic socialist agitation among factory workers and creating the human foundation for the Chinese Communist Party.Read →On Practice and On ContradictionIn the summer of 1937 at the Counter-Japanese Military and Political University in Yan'an, Mao Zedong delivered the lectures published as On Practice and On Contradiction, establishing a philosophical foundation that legitimized his own dialectical, peasant-centered revolutionary doctrine over Soviet textbook dogmatism.Read →The Yan'an Talks on Literature and ArtIn May 1942, Mao Zedong delivered his famous Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art, subordinating all artistic and cultural expression to politics and class struggle, demanding that urban intellectuals abandon bourgeois individualism to serve workers, peasants, and soldiers as cogwheels in the revolutionary machine.Read →
Democracy Wall and scar literatureFrom late 1977 to early 1979, the emergence of 'scar literature' and the Xidan Democracy Wall opened an unprecedented public reckoning with the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. What began with official encouragement to repudiate the Gang of Four quickly evolved into spontaneous demands for civil liberties and political democracy, led by figures like Wei Jingsheng, before Deng Xiaoping shut down the movement under the Four Cardinal Principles.Read →River Elegy broadcastIn June 1988, China Central Television broadcast River Elegy, a six-part documentary whose radical critique of traditional authoritarian culture and impassioned plea for Western-style opening captivated hundreds of millions and provoked a bitter battle between party reformers and conservatives.Read →