At the end of December 2019, Google released its word of the year as usual: “Hero.” This may have had something to do with the many superhero movies released that year. But in an age full of chaos and anxiety, calling for heroes does become one of people’s choices. After all, history is only an abbreviated record of past events, and it easily creates the illusion of a heroic view of history. The more a nation likes to “take history as a mirror,” the more likely it is to look eagerly for the arrival of a hero when facing a historical crisis it cannot handle. Napoleon for France and Hitler for Germany are examples, though the legacies they left were completely different. The former left the great French Civil Code and spread the spirit of French freedom and democracy across Europe; the latter left war, massacre, and a Germany reduced to ruins. Yet both were personally lifted onto the heroic throne by their own people. ...

In recent years, as Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd has become popular among readers, Chinese-language society has seen a wave of stigmatizing “the masses.” People seem to have found, in Le Bon’s arguments that lack logical continuity and empirical support, a justification for “controlling” public opinion. Following the method of looking for evidence after deciding on a conclusion, a series of “crimes” by mass opinion have been made public. Thus the claim that “public opinion eats people” has itself been accepted by “public opinion,” producing a strange scene of self-disarmament. ...

Accompanying the new sense of national pride brought about by rapid economic growth is the rise of the so-called “Chinese special theory.” While emphasizing the differences between China and other countries, it gives the current system a legal cloak that is “in line with national conditions,” thereby rejecting structural reforms in basic theory. At the same time, it exaggerates the “incomprehensibility” of Chinese culture to foreigners and refuses to accept dissection and criticism of itself by people outside the Chinese cultural circle. In any case, the theory of “China Special” constitutes one of the pillars of “xenophobia” as mentioned by Li Kanru, and it has opened the door for some conservatives to “work behind closed doors”**. ...

In a certain sense, Orwell was my political enlightenment. When I was in junior high school, my history teacher gave me a thin little book on a lazy afternoon as a reward for improved exam results. The book was Animal Farm. That night, after I got home, I read it in one sitting. Although I did not yet understand Soviet history or the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, this short fable still shocked me deeply. From then on, I began reading works of philosophy and ethics since the Enlightenment, and developed a strong interest in modern left-wing thought beginning with Rousseau. ...

To myself four years ago: I know that right now you are sitting in an evening self-study classroom, preparing for the gaokao with endless fantasies about the future. Although your recent mock-exam scores have not been ideal, you are still immersed in the glory of having once ranked among the top 500 in the province in the Jiangnan Ten Schools exam, holding on to a baseless confidence. You probably cannot imagine that, a little more than a month later, on June 22, your terrible final score will make you doubt your life. I admit that it took us a long time to let this go. That is why, around this time last year, in a letter to my self ten years from now, I swore that I would get into Renmin University for graduate school. Now the graduate entrance exam is over, and I did not get into Renmin. ...