The Great Wave of Reading
In the text of the memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, many authors coincidentally mention that there was a spontaneous reading boom among young people in that particular era. Because of the vast and unorganized area, no one has yet summarized and sorted it out in a more systematic way. It was a very special historical circumstance: after the establishment of the Communist Party in 1949, ideological control began immediately. Within less than a year, all newspapers were nationalized, and within two or three years, the public-private partnership in publishing was nationalized ahead of other industries and businesses. Political dissent was thus banned and the spread of religion was restricted. The Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China banned all unofficial publications, as well as many academic works such as the Hu Shih Wen Cun and Duxiu Wen Cun and non-mainstream literature; however, following the literary policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it was still largely open to Chinese and foreign literary masterpieces. In the 1950s, you could see Three Kingdoms, Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber, but not The Golden Vase, The Dangling Knave and The Pink Dressing House, and you could buy translations of Maupassant, Dickens and Tagore, but not The Chronicles of Monte Cristo …… By the climax of Mao Deng’s anti-revision in 1963, Soviet ideology also became off-limits, so China’s publishing industry and Reading monitoring further entered a period of cold ice. Beginning around 1963, when Mao Zedong preached about class struggle, cases of students and youths being criticized and disciplined for having read books that were not advocated by the Party and League organizations and being identified as having ideological problems occurred everywhere.
In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began, all entertainment activities such as movies and plays were stopped except for songs praising Mao (praising the Party and the army and the heroes), and all Chinese and foreign literary works, including novels and essays after 1949, were almost all “poisonous grass” or “having serious ideological and political problems “. What was displayed in bookstores, except for Mao’s quotations and Mao’s poems, were a few Marxist-Leninist classics or Lu Xun’s works. All others were forbidden books. During the period of “sweeping away all evil spirits and snakes and gods”, when people were criticized, copied, beaten, arrested, burned, and destroyed cultural relics, the whole country was in a state of slaughter, and all the horses were muddled.
In 1968, urban youths from all over the country went to the countryside on a large scale, and the youths all over the country quietly converged into a spontaneous reading boom. No one initiated it, it was a natural pursuit. Whether it was some of the young people who stayed in the city to work, or those who went to the countryside to work in the queue or on the farms, they all turned their attention to books without fail. This was a relatively rare dark wave of youth reading in Chinese history. Because of the large number of people, in just a few years, nearly ten million young people (the total number of people who went to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution was over 17 million) were eager to read some of the world’s most famous books, and they were simply intoxicated, what a spectacular cultural boom! But it was a hidden action that did not dare to be made public, and we all knew it by heart and exchanged it privately, so it could only be called a dark wave. In the countryside, there was often a copy of Wuthering Heights in England or The Third Year in France in the fields and by the bed. A copy of Anna Louise Strong’s The Age of Stalin was carried in the satchels of young workers or in the luggage of young people returning to the city from visiting relatives. …… Because it is a non-organizational act, no one person can possibly read all the good books in circulation; and because there is no one to guide them and a lack of reference books, the quality and benefits of reading vary in shades. From the perspective of aesthetics of reception, each reader has a different level of Education and cultivation of thought, so the effect after reading is also very different, and even the same.
The original motive of the dark tide of reading
First, the country’s economy was stagnant, the city could not arrange employment for secondary school graduates, and the rural community did not need labor, so it did not matter whether the youth participated in the labor force or not. The vast majority of the youths have to rely on their urban Parents to support them anyway. This gave them relative free Time. Secondly, the cultural Life of the country was extremely silent, especially in the countryside. Television sets were far from universal, and the popularity of radios in the cities was not very high, and the only movies available were “Lenin in October” and “Lenin in 1918”, “Mine War” and “Tunnel War”. It was only in the middle and late stages of the Cultural Revolution that the new movie “Green Pine Ridge” was released. All the radio broadcasts in rural areas gradually appeared after the 1970s. Traditional opera was banned because local theater companies were co-operated or banned, folk operas had to be controlled by the cultural centers, which were banned at this time because of the Cultural Revolution, and spontaneous folk songs in villages and towns were banned because they involved pornography such as “lover boy and girl”. Folk activities such as temple fairs, bazaars, and social plays had long since ceased. At this time, the cultural life of rural China was at its most dull and dreary point in history.
Although there was a difference between high school and junior high school, all intellectual youths were literate and could read. The world of books, without distances, the sea and the sky, could comfort the silence and longer knowledge. The taste of closed country is very boring and unbearable, the translated works can always provide some world knowledge. If a collective household of young people has a book of any kind, it has to be turned over until it is rotten. Thirdly, there is another important driving force, which is the psychology of prohibition. The cultural decree at that time was extremely left, all the past literary works, measured by the theory of Mao Jiang’s two literary symposiums, were the big poisonous grass of feudal capitalism. They were not allowed to be touched by young people. Literary psychology tells us that the more banned books and magazines are censored, the more people are attracted to read them. At that time, teenagers also held such a psychological posture, after leaving school, after leaving Home, at least we are an adult. This is not allowed, and that is not allowed either. Once you have the book in hand, you want to see what’s going on. Fourth, seeking knowledge and understanding. After the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and then going to the countryside, the difference between urban and rural areas was huge, and the reality of social life raised countless questions to the youth. Income, rations, work points, collective, labor …… can not get a reliable answer, see how the historical figures in the book live, how to explore, may be able to have some inspiration. Fifth, the physical hunger of adolescence and the hunger for love. After the waves of the Cultural Revolution, the young people who went to the countryside began to enter puberty. Education in the 1950s and 1960s did not include any sex education. Parents in general were also very secretive about it. The young people were unable to answer their own physical questions, and books were the easiest way to find advice. The Cultural Revolution was a time of struggle and killing, and there was a lack of loving attention in both urban and rural areas. The young people found some catharsis in books, and they loved them.
Broad classification
It is said that the Cultural Revolution raided, smashed and looted, burned and destroyed books? Where are the books to read? Sweeping always misses the net, and not too little. The raids did not necessarily result in the burning of books immediately. The streets and alleys are prone to fires when lit. Mostly, some paintings and so-called incriminating books were packed away, while the rest of the books were sealed and not allowed to be moved. It is said that someone soon suggested that it is not appropriate to burn again, it is better to concentrate into pulp, and then used as raw materials. Some of the books and magazines that were copied out were concentrated in schools or Red Guard headquarters. Because of the chaotic management, in addition to Gold and silver jewelry, the most easily stolen “copied materials” are Western art and photography books (including body art, known as yellow books). Instead, the heavier literary and academic books gradually became the prey of the book-loving teenagers. Professor Song Zhenhao, director of the Center for the Study of Oracle and Yin Shang History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pulled out a copy of Guo Moruo’s “Study of Oracle Characters” from a pile of books that was about to be burned when no one was looking. Decades later, he has become a stalwart of academic research on the oracle bones and the history of the Yin dynasty.
In recent years, it has been revealed that Kang Sheng, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and others took possession of cultural relics and antiques from the copied materials. Many valuable books had been accidentally stolen when the copied materials were returned to various places in the 1980s. For the people involved or the younger generation, it is fortunate that they can still see a little bit of the aftermath of the great disaster, what else is there to say?
The books read by the youth during the great tide can probably be divided into two categories. The first category is the main, is the ancient and modern Chinese and foreign literary masterpieces. In addition to the Three Kingdoms, the Water Margin, the Western Tour, the Red Chamber, the Chinese classics such as “The Peony Pavilion”, “The Chronicle of the Western Chamber”, “Legends of the Tang and Song Dynasties” and “Three Words and Two Pieces”, there were also European classics such as Russian, English and French. The American Writer Deleuze’s “Sister Carrie”, Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”, “Farewell to Arms”, Spanish Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” …… Soviet “How Steel is Made” and “The Young Guards” are not too rare, and the Western unpopular “Gadfly” is a Soviet hit and popular among the youth. The “The Chronicles of Monte Cristo”, which had been banned and out of print for many years, was also in circulation at this time, and the strictly monitored “Jin Ping Mei” was harder to find. In addition, there were also copies of the folk handwritten novels “The Heart of a Young Girl” (with some sexual descriptions) and “The Second Handshake”. In those silent and dreary times, they also served as a bit of literary enlightenment.
The second category is the gray book, the color book. This was a series of odd publications that lasted for forty years in the Chinese publishing industry. Starting from the “Chinese translation of world academic masterpieces series” in the 1950s, all single-volume books had no personalized binding, either gray and white, gray and blue, or gray and yellow, with only the author and the signature; after the Cultural Revolution, philosophy, economics, history and geography …… appeared in different colors of orange, green, yellow, blue, ochre, etc. Ochre and other different back cover colors, and even black leather books (Zhang Guotao, Wang Ming and CCP traitor writings). The Chinese translation series, originally an introduction to pre-Marx scholarly literature, was later expanded as well. The earliest gray book, The Age of Stalin, exposes the shocking history of famine and party purges under Stalin. One cannot help but be reminded of the reality of China’s three-year famine and the Cultural Revolution. The “original intention” of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was to use the publication of Chinese versions of Soviet literary and political books to promote the struggle against Soviet revisionism. But these excellent works, with their humanistic portrayal and humanitarian spirit, had a profound impact on Chinese youth.
Some out-of-print traditional books such as “The Golden Lotus” and “The Chronicles of Monte Cristo” may have been obtained from copybooks, each with its own classical knowledge and spirit of struggle; but the gray books passed down from some cadres’ families were more thoughtful and realistic. Russian and Soviet literature with a strong tradition of realism, “What to do”, “Rotting”, “Dead Souls”, “Anna Karenina” and “Humiliated and Damaged” …… have a strong call to emancipation of personality. The realism of Soviet writers is more daring and blunt than that of Chinese writers, daring to expose the consequences of Stalin’s cult of the individual and dared to depict the reality of cadres’ privileges, eulogized the greatness of humanity and humanism; (Yugoslav Gilas’ theoretical monograph “The New Class”, with its sharp ideas, had a very small circulation). The basic thrust of classic European and American literature is always inseparable from the universal value of putting people first. From Ehrenburg’s Man, Age, Life, to Kochetov’s Secretary of State and What Do You Really Want, from Rousseau’s Confessions and Locke’s Treatise on Government to Cohen’s Common Sense and the Federalist Papers of Hamilton and others, the human spirit and sense of rights in them remind readers that we are human beings, with human dignity and even more human rights.
These awakening ideas lifted the spirits of many youths and prepared the ground for the end of the Cultural Revolution and the reform and opening up of the country. Many writers emerged from the youth, and after the resumption of the college entrance examination, many of them went on to university or graduate school, or became advanced figures in reform and opening up. Looking back, we can find the sprouts and sparks of striving and invigorating ideas from the craze of reading forbidden books back then. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese society gradually accepted the concept of human rights, universal values, and advocated a people-oriented approach, which should also have a hidden causal relationship with the intellectual enlightenment of the youth generation. It is unfortunate that a nation was subjected to severe confinement for a long time; however, there was a period of time when millions of intellectual youths studied seriously and simultaneously, which is a great blessing among misfortunes.
However, don’t get the wrong impression that there was a freedom to read without restriction in those days. The book on the October Revolution is still John Reed’s “Ten Days That Shook the World”. The book on the history of the Soviet Union is still “A Concise Course in the History of the United Communist Party”. This history book is an encyclopedia of the Stalinist system, a hodgepodge of falsified history and personal worship, a standard version of Marxist-Leninist dogmatic philosophy. It was only because of the Chinese Communist Party‘s anti-revisionist struggle that the Chinese were able to read novels such as Khrushchev’s Secret Report of the Twentieth Congress and What Happened to a Man. Chinese history was not so “lucky”. Qian Mu’s Outline of National History and Yu Yingshi’s History and Thought are not likely to reach the Chinese people. The scope of reading was still basically shrouded in the atmosphere of the 1950s when books were banned and monitored, with the difference that the chaos of the Cultural Revolution broke through a bit of the so-called “internal reading” within the Party, allowing a large group of intellectual youth to access more internal reading, gray and color books.
Xi Jinping‘s Self-Drying Book List
When Xi Jinping visited the United States, Britain, France and Russia, he read a long list of books in one breath, claiming to have read many, many books. This lack of connotation is really not complimentary. This style is clearly in the world’s attention of the diplomatic occasion because of lack of confidence and self-exposure of shallow, just reflects the psychological alleged compensation mentality: “here is no silver two hundred”.
It is often said that the chest has a poetic spirit. A little social experience people understand, listen to its words, watch its actions, you can roughly know the cultural heritage of its people’s ideological cultivation. The book list to dry themselves to show off, people believe that you have read a lot of poetry and books?
The actual fact is, Xi Jinping is very shy about his soft spot. He is the 68th junior high school student who attended the least of the three oldest classes of the Cultural Revolution, and attended only one year of secondary school. (Beijing Bayi School, junior class teacher Chen Qiuying.) The university is Tsinghua, which is actually the most humiliating period in Tsinghua’s history for workers, peasants and soldiers cadets, who were not enrolled in the college entrance exam, and were condemned by former president Jiang Nanxiang that their level was not as good as that of the junior college students before the Cultural Revolution. The education level of the workers and peasants cadets was once recognized by the State Education Commission as college level, not up to undergraduate level; however, they were allowed to apply for master’s degree with the same academic ability. Xi Jinping did not go through the master’s entrance examination and graduation, and crossed the level to enter the doctoral program itself, which is against Tsinghua University’s admission regulations. Xi Jinping’s doctoral degree itself is one of the typical examples of corruption in China’s education and improper academic style in universities.
After Xi’s education was made public, he has been questioned by overseas newspapers such as Open Magazine since 2008. During the 17th Communist Party Congress, the official website quietly erased his doctoral degree from the list of the Central Standing Committee. After his power was consolidated at the 18th and 19th National Congresses, his doctoral degree was again visible. This is a sign of the corruption of power.
The young and illiterate
As mentioned earlier, Xi Jinping is also one of the three oldest youths who went to the countryside, and should be part of the dark tide of youths studying during the Cultural Revolution. However, he started school a year earlier and was less than 16 years old when he went to the countryside, so his maturity in understanding and thinking was a little later. The basic requirement for reading is to know how to read. In general, it is possible to estimate how many Chinese characters you can recognize after a few years of primary and secondary school. The “Full-time Language Curriculum Standards” prepared by the domestic education authorities stipulate that students in the sixth grade of elementary school should be able to recognize about three thousand commonly used Chinese characters, of which two thousand five hundred can be written. Domestic junior high school textbooks (such as the 2011 edition of the junior high school language textbook) stipulate that the general language level for graduation from junior high school is to know three thousand five hundred characters. So how many words do first-year students who have not graduated know? Let’s overestimate a bit, about three thousand two hundred? According to computer statistics in mathematical linguistics (see page 172 of Linguistics and Modern Science, edited by Chen Mingyuan), a person can learn 3,700 Chinese characters in order to read through 99.9% of general newspaper articles, but there are still some raw characters in literary language, science and technology, and names of famous places that can be understood in general.
When the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, Xi had only finished his first year of school and could recognize less than 3,002 Chinese characters, and about half of the 6,000 to 7,000 Chinese characters in the State Language Commission’s “General Standardized Chinese Character List” were still incomplete. He is still about 500 Chinese characters short of the minimum bottleneck of 3700. In addition to a lack of literacy, cadre sons also tend to be slightly less socially cognizant than their civilian counterparts due to their wealthy families. Xi Jinping is also a year younger than his classmates, so he is a step behind in reading and comprehension. It is possible to read newspapers and young people’s books, but it is not credible to say that he read and understood many famous Chinese and foreign books during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution in 1966-1968. If the books were in traditional Chinese characters, it would be even more difficult to read them. Xi Jinping was not an honors student. He entered high school in 1965. At that time, he was not admitted to the school in the vicinity, but by examination. If he had good grades, he would have been admitted to Beijing No. 4 Middle School, No. 8 Middle School, No. 101 Middle School, or Tsinghua Middle School, etc. Xi Jinping had mediocre grades, but because he was the son of military cadres, he was admitted to No. 8 School as usual.
In 1966, the Cultural Revolution unrest began. Xi’s Family was affected, and he was soon raided and swept out of his home and moved into the dormitory of the Party School. He himself was involved in the activities of the United Organization and was detained by the police and criticized. During this time, it was possible for him to read some Chinese and foreign novels such as Red Rock, The Fiery King, How Steel is Made, and Gadfly, and he could basically understand them.
Xi Jinping’s reminiscences say that after the Cultural Revolution, when his family moved into the Party School, he got a copy of “Three Words and Two Pieces”, some of which he said he could recite by heart. The book was half-written and half-white, how much could he understand? The storyline is believed to be understandable if he looks carefully, such as “undressing”, “roll up your sleeves and do your best” and so on, but it is difficult to say what the poems and phrases and part of the literary narrative are in each of them. His list of books also includes “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”, the original text of the Three Kingdoms is relatively simple and ancient, a few parts are simply in literary language, but also sometimes involved in historical allusions; perhaps he read the comic books of the Three Kingdoms, which can be read, but the names of people and places still have a lot of vocabulary. At that time, there were many translations of famous books, such as Chernyshevsky’s Life and Aesthetics, Montesquieu’s Letters to the Persians, Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew and Fei Zhengqing’s America and China. But I am afraid that all of them are too difficult for minors to understand. Of course, reading at this time is also a kind of remedial learning, so that he can learn some vocabulary on his own and improve his knowledge. The number of words he knows will gradually increase.
In 1969 in the countryside, Xi Jinping listened carefully to the list of the nine universities, his father’s comeback was hopeless, and he wandered around in sorrow and became addicted to smoking. He did not feel at ease working in the production team and stole back to Beijing, and as a result, he was imprisoned again for nearly six months. In the juvenile detention center, he had no opportunity to read anything other than the quotations of Chairman Mao and recite the regulations of public security supervision. After his freedom was restored, he went to his aunt’s house to recuperate, so he should be able to read some books and magazines, and it is estimated that he gradually broke the bottleneck of 3,700 Chinese characters after 1970. It is difficult to understand works of high ideological and artistic quality. At this time his mother, Qi Xin, saw a document from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China regarding university admissions to rural areas and wrote to the production team’s Party branch asking to urge Xi Jinping, as well as to him personally, to try to be recommended for university. It was only from about the second half of 1970 that Xi Jinping’s mood became largely stable.
Political Performance Interferes with Reading and Deep Thought
The Study Times (2016.7-2017.3), sponsored by the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, published a continuous report on Xi Jinping’s seven years of youthfulness. It featured the brothers Lei Pingsheng and Lei Rongsheng, Beijing youths who arrived in Yanchuan at the same time as Xi Jinping. The brothers specifically talked about their studies. Rather, they listed some of the books that the three read together at that time. Because the brothers were the sons of military cadres, the books were mostly military works. For example, “Selected Works of Clausewitz”, “Roosevelt’s Insights”, “Important Battles of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union”, etc., and the more common “A Brief History of China” and “The Age of Stalin”. The rest were the original Marxist-Leninist works that were required by party committees at all levels at the time: The Communist Manifesto, The French Civil War, Critique of the Gotha Programme, The State and Revolution, and The Anti-Dühring Doctrine. Among them, even the 1952 edition of the Traditional Chinese Dictionary of Knowledge, which Xi brought from home, is mentioned, favoring those bourgeois translated masterpieces that did not confirm his book list. It is logical to say so.
Xi Jinping’s character is not of the youthful romantic type, persistent and affordable. His and his mother’s common goal was to perform positively to get recommended for college. Let us not forget that in the political climate of the time, none of those translated masterpieces in the book list were forbidden books, the cultural fountains of what was officially considered bourgeois or revisionist. To be exposed to these books was a negative or even backward political expression. While war historical documents could be said to be about revolutionary warfare, reading those books on humanism and humanitarianism was a manifestation of bourgeois ideology. Although illiterate villagers do not necessarily understand, there are still more or less illiterate cadres who are not all illiterate and have contact with the villagers back home.
For example, Xi Jinping once asked a cadre to bring a letter to Lei Rongsheng, but he opened the letter halfway and read it. The letter contained comments about Jiang Qing. At that time, discussing Jiang Qing was a serious political crime, so Xi and Lei gave the man a military coat as a gift and asked him to keep quiet. This incident fully illustrates that even if you are a youth, you have to be careful in politics at that time. As an activist seeking recommendation for university admission and membership in the Party, Xi Jinping would never fail to pay attention to his political performance. It is not necessary to interfere with the political climbing career of mother and son in order to read a few translated masterpieces and petty books. The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to the public. The team ate with the masses, lived with them, worked with them, talked about policies and lines, and he was still thinking and studying every day with a translated masterpiece on human rights and human nature, is that possible?
In 1975, Xi Jinping entered Tsinghua University. Could he have read these translated masterpieces during his three years in college? We know that there was no personal privacy in university life in those days. Seven or eight people shared a bunk room, attended classes together, went down to the factory together to open doors and engage in critical struggles. Xi Jinping served as a propaganda member of the class party branch, and had to be an example of a strong political stance and a clear flag. What was the atmosphere of Tsinghua at that time? The leadership team was Xie Jingyi and Chi Qun, the extreme leftist hit men of Mao Zedong and the Gang of Four who were red-hot. Zhang Chunqiao’s theories against bourgeois legal rights were clamoring in the public opinion. As a student of Tsinghua’s workers, peasants and soldiers, and a party cadre, did he dare to read in public or in private the translated masterpieces on legal rights, human rights equality and so on? Did he disregard the politically correct comments in the graduation Appraisal? The Gang of Four’s set of ultra-leftist cultural and academic standards were only gradually dispersed by the wave of reform and opening up in 1977, after the so-called “continued criticism of Deng” had been intermittent.
It was only after the publication of Li Honglin’s “Reading is not forbidden” in the April 1979 issue of Reading Magazine that reading some bourgeois literature was no longer considered a sign of backward thinking. The same was true for Xi Jinping, who was unlikely to have read these Chinese translations during his university years. Some Soviet novels that were popularly distributed internally while he was in college, such as Hot Blood, Falling Corners, and The White Wheelbarrow, and books like American Daimler’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. All were allowed to be read within the party.
Some people recall Xi borrowing political and economic works such as Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” from classmates when he was at Tsinghua. That would have been in 1978, when he was about to graduate. At that time he said he did not want to work in chemical synthesis technology after graduation. What a joke! When he first applied for a job, he chose Tsinghua as one of his three choices, but didn’t he know that Tsinghua was a science and technology college? Probably he studied chemical engineering for three years and found that he had no specialties in science and technology, so he wanted to turn back to politics, right? By the time Xi Jinping graduated and became secretary of the Ministry of National Defense, he was already 25 years old and had divorced his first wife, Ke Lingling, shortly after their Marriage, and had long since faded from his youth and entered the political arena. To be fair, as a high-ranking Communist Party official, he should be considered a cadre who paid more attention to reading than the casual group of dirty jokes in the Party. But reading at this time is very different from reading as a teenager.
The heart and mind of the party government
Teenagers read with the heart of a naked son, and if it is an excellent work, they will have a spiritual meeting with the author. Humanity and humanitarianism, universal values will vibrate back and forth in the intersection and enchant the reader’s disposition. Romero’s question: “What is the point of living if not to pursue the truth?” The Confessions opens with Rousseau’s confession: “I want to reveal the true nature of a man nakedly to the world. That man is me.” would make every teenager who upholds his or her nakedness henceforth offer a cold self-reproach for his or her lying intentions. As a teenager, Xi would have been exposed to a number of books from the dark tide of intellectual reading. But when he grew older, became more literate, and began to read and think, he returned too soon to the party system (joining the league and the party and going to university), losing his nakedness and following the political thinking of party politics. Therefore, when Chinese society also began to discuss human rights and universal values, Xi Jinping accused Westerners of having nothing better to do than to eat ……; when the world was happy that the Stalinist system finally collapsed in the Soviet Union, Xi Jinping sighed and said that the Soviet Communist Party “has no one who is a man”! !
According to the party school teachers, for the party political echelon successor, local and central party schools constantly assign lecturers to arrange a certain book, to the echelon successor “lecture reading”. Lecturers choose a book, first to talk about the executive summary, and then select individual chapters, after analysis and review, the book is considered read. This reading method, ten or twenty years down the bibliography must be considerable. Xi Jinping has been the successor of the party and political echelon at all levels for many years, and the books mentioned in the list are the most respected books in the academic world in the 1980s and 1990s, and the lecturers are willing to recommend them for reading. The American Federalist Papers and Penn’s Common Sense, the German Heidegger’s On the Way to Language, and quite a few other translated masterpieces were available in Chinese only after Xi Jinping officially entered politics (from the Ministry of Defense to Zhengding County). It is unlikely that they were his early readings. We can’t say that he didn’t read the masterpieces he “talked about reading”, and he could name the authors and backgrounds; what impressed him most, of course, was that they were all Western masterpieces in translation. Since they are Western masterpieces, why not present them in a list? The list of books is a sparse and elegant one. It is not surprising that the deep meaning of these masterpieces are the essence of the ideology of democratic constitutionalism, which happens to be the universal values that the Chinese Ministry of Propaganda needs to suppress and block today!
(2018-4-23 World Book Day)
Notes.
For first-year junior high school students, examples of the more difficult to understand the language.
⒈ but said Wei Gao long town Shu, know that age is getting old, in case of the West Fan South barbarians, some decision measures, fear of damage to the prestige. On the table to request the bones, because the recommendation of Uncle Ya to replace. (Three Words, page 982, Wei Gao and Shu Shu are the names of the people in the story)
The Emperor peal asked the ministers to ask the cause of the disaster, Cai Yong, the parliamentary minister, thought that The Japanese cicada fall chicken, is the women’s temple interference in government, the words are quite straightforward. The emperor sighed and got up to change his clothes. Cao section in the back of the eavesdropping, all announced around, so other things to frame Yong in the crime, released to the field. (The first page of the first edition of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Cai Yong and Cao Jie are historical names)
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