Rainbow Pie

Note: This article is my self-description in Chinese, I used DeepL to translate it into English, due to the limitation of energy without review

I was supposed to be just the son of an average Chinese elementary and high school student, my mother don’t know where is Europe, and my father disappeared . I was going to follow a life similar to that of my relatives, haphazardly work in a factory, find someone to marry and have children with, meet a serious illness spend all my savings, and be cremated. So, how was my fate changed?

I had a passion for politics since I was a child. As an only child, I had a lot of time to myself when I was not at school. I was good at passing time with fantasy. I loved playing with blocks the most. When I was living in the urban village of Xiashuijing in Buji, Shenzhen, the TV news broadcasted that the Jiujiang River Bridge was broken by a boat, and many vehicles drove directly into the rushing river late at night, and people questioned the cause of the accident and whether the bridge was a tofu-dreg project why it broke upon impact. I also built blocks in my bath tub and began to simulate the broken bridge when the ship crashed into it.

In addition to aliens taking over the earth or allying with earthlings against another group of aliens, I also imagined myself as the president of China, because I didn’t know that there was no president in China, only the president and the general secretary of the Communist Party of China. When I came to Europe, once I told people about my personal experience of political enlightenment, I repeatedly told the story of an eight-year-old boy who asked his father who the next president would be, and he said Xi Jinping. That time was 2009, and the father already knew who the next general secretary would be, while no one knew if the next president of the United States was still Barack Obama. That was the first time I noticed something different about the country I was living in.

The Little Yueyue incident had also caused a vast amount of heat. People criticized why the Chinese public was so indifferent, watching a little girl being knocked to the ground and run over by countless vehicles, and finally Little Yueyue was rescued by a man from the lowest strata of society.

If I were to break the generation, my life could be divided into the period before I knew about June 4 and the period after I knew about June 4. When I was in junior high school, there was a boy in my class and we were kind of a group of good friends, and he and I would occasionally spout off about Chinese politics. At that time, Xi Jinping had just launched an anti-corruption campaign, and there was a lot of content on the Internet that sang Xi Jinping’s praises, such as “Xi Da Da Loves Peng Ma Ma”. But I felt strange. Corruption was wrong in the first place, and it should be taken for granted that it should be fought, so why should it become a matter of praise and praise? And since corruption has been widespread before, is it not a sign that Hu Jintao is not doing a good enough job, or even allowing corruption to run rampant under him? That boy told me at that time that to fight corruption is to remove dissidents. I began to understand that there are different factions within the CCP, and that anti-corruption is a political tool that can be used to great advantage without paying much political capital. It can be used to gain moral legitimacy among the public by unleashing a propaganda machine to confiscate huge amounts of corruption to replenish the treasury, and it can also be used as a weakness to take advantage of the opportunity to crack down on political enemies and make people obedient.

After Chai Jing’s “Under the Dome” documentary came out, the Internet set off a frenzy of debate, and for the first time I knew the dangers of haze and PM2.5, the incompetence and corruption of local bureaucrats, and the power of kn95 masks and 12345 citizen hotlines. Even in the class, there were students and teachers discussing the documentary. However, the documentary was soon banned and taken down from the entire network. At that time was the first time I knew the power of the Communist Party, which could give an order behind the black box, and all traces of its existence disappeared, leaving only a few pertinent and permissible commentary articles by the government.

Knowing about June 4 was a complete accident. At that time I had just entered adolescence and had a naive understanding of the world. I had a kind of post-00s optimism, because China’s GDP was growing at a fast pace, everything material was becoming more and more abundant, my family was getting better and better, we moved from the urban village into a residential building in an apartment complex, and we started going to restaurants once a week on a regular basis for morning tea, eating deep-sea fish oil and bird’s nest shark’s fin. When I was preparing to enter high school, I used to go to two posters to hang out. I loved talking about politics. That’s when a senior who was studying overseas and was discouraged about the future of China said to me, “Look up the Tiananmen Square incident. I said I knew about the Tiananmen Incident, the one on April 5, 1976. Actually, there was another Tiananmen Incident.

At that time, I didn’t need to go to Wikipedia, so I searched for the Tiananmen Incident, and I started to find two results, one was the April 5th Incident, and the other was June 4th.

Wikipedia was an eye-opener for me. I can say that I wouldn’t be where I am today without Wikipedia. I trust Wikipedia immensely because every sentence in an entry has a citation source, has statements from multiple perspectives, comments from different stakeholders, and so on. For the first time, I knew that the Chinese government was using armies and tanks against unarmed students and citizens, and I was a student. For the first time, I learned that a man named Zhao Ziyang in China was put under house arrest until his death because he refused to shoot at students.

The period when I met Tang Guiren and became close friends with him was my revolutionary years. Tang Guiren was his pen name. His articles can still be found on the website. Meeting Guiren was also an accident. I was a founding member and vice president of the school’s astronomy club, and Guiren was an ordinary member. At that time, we were watching shooting stars together on the rooftop, and he was telling me about Kant’s moral law. I am so big and thick a person, parents are not intellectuals, illiterate, which know what Kant, the starry sky overhead, the heart of the moral law. How romantic. I was fascinated. What a wise man. I developed a wonderful affection for him, gradually crossing the border of friendship. One day at lunch I didn’t go with my fellow schoolmates in our class as usual, but with Tang Guiren. I asked him if you knew about June 4. He said yes. From then on we opened the door to wonder. He was the first person I met in real life who knew about June 4.

He took me to the library and took me to read the Ideal State m translation series. We followed the map and began to read the works of Xiong Peiyun, Liu Yu, Chen Danqing, Xu Zhiyuan, Liang Wendao and other public intellectuals, began to read history, began to read the autobiographies of the old liberals, began to read political philosophy, read Francisco Fukuyama’s The Origin of Political Order and The End of History and the Last Man, began to read Shen Zhihua’s history of the Cold War, Gao Hua’s How the Red Sun Rises –The History of the Cold War” by Shen Zhihua, “How the Red Sun Rises” by Gao Hua, “The History of the Yan’an Rectification Movement” by Gao Hua, “The Old System and the Revolution” by Gao Hua, and countless other public intellectuals such as Zizhong Gyun.

However, we were indeed young people, with a lot of energy and impulsiveness, and our blood was boiling. We started to form a party called the Free China Party. I designed the logo on the powerpoint software, which is the word “freedom” with the word “June 4” in the middle. The purpose of our party is freedom, democracy, human rights and constitutionalism. There were only two of us in the party, and we took turns to be the chairman according to Zhao Ziyang’s vision. We started to develop our membership, we started to popularize the knowledge of June 4 to other students, we debated in the playground about intellectuality and morality, Machiavellianism and ethics, whether to assassinate Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping as we did Hitler, and if assassinating Hitler could prevent the death of millions of Jews, whether to assassinate Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping. If the assassination of Hitler could prevent the death of millions of Jews, could the assassination of Mao Zedong prevent the death of millions of Chinese people.

Tang Guiren taught me about cynicism, about Xu Ben’s critique of modern cynicism, about the difference between the two kinds of neo-liberalism (new/neo). He lent me Orwell’s 1984, translated by Sun Zhongxu, and I gobbled it up in class. I was a very slow reader, and I was ashamed of it. I’m afraid I don’t have some strange disease. As a child I used to eat instant noodle seasoning packets as a snack with my cousin, and omega3 golden capsules as a snack. Am I suffering from heavy metal poisoning or mercury poisoning. The factory next to my home sometimes emits a foul odor from toxic compounds late at night. I fished with my mom at the outfall next to the neighborhood and the cooked fish also emitted a foul odor. Every time I went back home or to the farm, the stench of urea smelled heavenly and rushed my nose.

It was only later that I started to like Liu Xiaobo and Camus as my life mentors. I was playing Model UN. I liked a girl who was average looking but full of wisdom, like a female version of Tang Guiren. I asked her to send me The Outsider, and she bought me a translation by Li Yuming. I fell in love with Camus, and I started buying the complete works of Camus edited by Mingjiu Liu. I learned that Camus had had the same doubts as I did, and that his play The Justified was set in the context of the February Revolution that assassinated the Russian Tsar. Assassinate one man, kill one life, to save countless others. Camus’s answer was to go for it, but thus become a murderer anyway, and thus voluntarily punished.

I started thinking about my new name. Tang Guiren said Mao Zedong’s pen name was mostly with Muzi Li as his last name. When I was in junior high school I fantasized about getting my own personal brand called Reed’s Song. So I got the pen name into Li Zhiguo. I was not satisfied and wanted another name. I want to tattoo my idols in my heart. I took Liu Xiaobo, Lin Zhao, Zhao Ziyang each take a word, into my name, and harmonize with the sunrise, so it is called Liu Zhaoyang.