Arteffect 11 is out on the streets of Qingdao and available for download here.
Check out the foreword from Arteffect 11 (English version only):
Out on the Street, You’ll Pay It Back Later
My colleague told me that university students nowadays are not keen on part-time work, and they don’t care about cultural quality either, with maybe Super Girl and Pretty Boy being the exception. This makes me think of the Beat generation in the West. Their story does not repeat itself in our young generation. Actually, the Beat generation has never collapsed. They were just tired of the cold war, the white terror, and tired of the world created by adults. So they used a lot of differnent ways to explore, to strive, and to change, and as a result a new world order, a peaceful era came. How about us? Maybe one day you will realize that the real dreariness is that one doesn’t even have the ability to collapse.
Real universities appeared in this country a little over a hundred years ago, but the initial glory previously reached makes today’s luxurious campuses look pale. Cai Yuanpei, Fu Sinian, Jiang Menglin, Zhu Kezhen, and Yang Zhensheng all contributed to the prosperity and academic atmosphere of Qingdao, but the footprints they left for university education have been wiped away by the stink of money. History does not make progress from here. Who can still remember the principle of academic freedom, teaching freedom, and study freedom? Where are the values and norms of today’s universities?
In the past, directives from the Ministry of Education to Peking University could be returned unopened. Nowadays who remembers the independence and dignity that universities should have? The university has never been a cradle of tool making, but now we may not even be able to make tools. Therefore, the first thing to collapse is not the children but the school that strangled their mind. We need to pursue truth, we need to be insistent, we need to love our country and love other people. We need all these things now even more than at any other time, but did we learn these from school?
Passing through Yushan Road, I was looking for some trace of the principal Yang Zhensheng but found instead that his name and reputation are not remembered today. Our city’s history is very short, but we have forgotten so much. The Guangzhou restaurant is still there, but the Drunken Eight Immortals have disappeared. Without Principal Yang, what good are the so-called former residences of notables? Without Principal Yang, how can we talk about cultural beginnings? The cultural celebrities at that time could not imagine that more than seventy years later the restaurants in this city are much more luxurious, but the culture can never return to its boom time. The winding and quiet paths in Xiao Yu Shan were the only paths to be passed by the master of Chinese culture Liang Shiqiu as he borrowed and returned books to Song Chunfang. How many men of literature passed along these paths at that time? If you stroll through there, you will find that it is quite a long road.
Waves of so-called outstanding students have lost the basic ability to live their lives in schools, and lost all that universities should give them. How could they have any other choice? They can only find comfort from material things and satisfaction from fortune and money, thereby to improve their station in life from the accompanying “status”. They never care about others, just as they are never concerned about the truth. When these so-called elites become the future of this country, do we really need to sigh about the fickleness of the world, to feel strange about human hearts not being what they were in the old days, and to feel surprise why there is still so much fatuousness and numbness?
If even our children in the ivory towers are like this, how about those who drift on the street after middle school? In order to let them walk on the right path and not indulge in Internet addiction, the government dispenses electric shock therapy, which is looked upon by those children with bitter smiles. Why do our descendants need to face to all these things? Five murder cases in kindergartens and schools thrill us. Experts and scholars have various opinions, but no one recognizes that the murderers are all from a vulnerable group. Why does one vulnerable group would hurt another more vulnerable group? I remember the Beijing child who went to attack a mighty group.
Yang Jia once gave such a explanation of criminal motivation: “Regarding humiliation, if it needs to be carried a whole lifetime, I would rather break the law. You need to give me an explanation for anything, and if you cannot give me an explanation, I will give you one.” China is developing, and the GDP is always maintained. Regardless of whether it is right or wrong, we are resplendent for sixty years, but how about the price? How will people in the future look at the price we’ve paid today?
Out on the street, you’ll pay it back later.
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