The Disqualified Ones — A Life Missed, A Mind Unlearned

I’ve come to realize that what we are witnessing today is a profound disqualification of human life. The degeneration of our society is, in essence, the degeneration of our species—a regression to what people once called the state of the “Sick Man of East Asia.” We live among others, yet somehow we’ve become standardized, dulled versions of ourselves—variations of Run Tu, the peasant boy from Lu Xun’s story who grows into a figure of ignorance and resignation. So today, I want to speak directly about those years of life that have been delayed, squandered, or misspent. And I believe I have the right to talk about this—because I, too, feel I have lost five, maybe six years of my own life.

This afternoon, for example, I was scheduled to begin my talk at three. It’s now past five—two hours delayed. Among those of you here, many are my friends, most still young, with your lives at the beginning. Perhaps you have not yet felt the same ache of wasted years that I do. That’s why I feel it’s my duty to share this with you—to let you see what it means when a life is postponed.

All of us are walking our own life paths, but sometimes, as we walk, we discover that we’ve fallen behind. We’ve lost our rhythm, or perhaps we’ve been distracted by the scenery along the way. Sometimes, we take the wrong turn and lose ourselves altogether. And then one day, like waking from a long dream, we realize that the best years of our lives have quietly slipped away.

Thirty years ago, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the people of China were consumed with exposing and condemning the Cultural Revolution. Everywhere you went, people lamented the “ten years of youth” that had been stolen from them. The literature of that time—scar literature, root-seeking literature—was all about this, written in the spirit of mourning for the years that had been lost. In politics too, the leadership responded to public sentiment, repudiating the Cultural Revolution and opening the era of Reform and Opening.

Very soon after, society was swept by an exhilarating sense of vitality. You could feel it in every layer of the nation: the energy, the hunger for change, the sense that we were finally awakening. Popular songs of the time even praised young people as “the new generation of the 1980s,” proclaiming that glory belonged to us. There was one song in particular—perhaps some of you have heard it. It was the anthem of our youth. Back then, we believed it captured our dreams, even our understanding of music itself. The lyrics went something like this: “In twenty years, let’s meet again; glory belongs to the new generation of the 1980s.”

But now, decades later, people of my generation have had to face the painful truth that those ideals were illusions. The songs that once stirred our blood now sound naïve, even foolish. We are all middle-aged now—our parents are old, our children still young—and we are exhausted, drained, struggling just to stay afloat. Very few of us live freely anymore.

And it’s not just us. When I returned to Beijing these past two years, I met many people from the generations after mine—the so-called post-80s and post-90s—and they, too, told me that their lives have been delayed. They’ve mortgaged themselves to the banks, to their bosses, to the endless weight of survival. They are running for their lives every day, just to stay alive.

What saddens me most is that I see more and more young people surrendering before the unpredictable fate of this era—bending, retreating, or simply giving up. And what’s even more absurd is that many of them, living within this atmosphere of resignation, have begun to defend it. They tell themselves, this is life, this is the way society works.

But if we change our perspective, we see something terrifying: we have mortgaged our very lives. We allow supra-economic forces to extract and exploit us; we live without dignity, without individuality. And that—this silent surrender—is how life itself becomes delayed, wasted. It has already led to the re-enshrouding of our minds, the regression of our collective intelligence across generations.

Everywhere I look, I see evidence of this postponement of life. It’s visible in every corner of our society, yet few people ever pause to think about the consequences. Sometimes I feel like a helpless observer of life—watching all these scenes unfold and feeling unbearably heavy inside. Look at my hair, white before its time. People often joke that I worry too much. I think of Liang Qichao quoting Zhuangzi: “I receive orders in the morning and drink ice in the evening—can my heart not be aflame?” Indeed, my heart burns with things that cannot be released.

But the truth is, I watch my friends—especially the young ones—live lives that are being delayed. And I can see that something essential is being held back. In their physical and mental development, in their social maturity, in their understanding of rights and duties—they are stunted, arrested, regressing. Once a life is delayed, you don’t just fall behind. You lose mental clarity; your very humanity begins to regress.

We often say life is like rowing upstream—if you don’t advance, you drift backward. But in this age of materialism and opportunism, with all the external pressures that seduce us into stillness, many have simply stopped rowing. And once you stop, you don’t stay still—you slide back. That’s what we’ve become: not people who fail to progress, but people who quietly degenerate.

I remember an example I once shared on Weibo. A friend of mine has a son who did very well in middle school, except he absolutely hated political education. Eventually, his aversion grew so deep that he couldn’t even bear to hear about the subject. Naturally, such a student couldn’t survive the Chinese college entrance system. Luckily, his parents were open-minded. They let him choose his own path.

While his classmates were buried in exam prep, he spent his days exploring online. One day he came across an Austrian university that accepted international students. He took the entrance exam, passed, and went abroad. After a year of study, he returned to visit his old classmates—now at China’s top universities—and realized how different they had become. They were still children, still trapped in a high-school mindset, while he had already learned to think and live independently. He had opinions, judgments, ideas. His peers listened to him with respect.

Later, after graduation, his classmates fought desperately to stay in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, while he—with his parents’ support—moved to the countryside of Jiangxi Province. There he partnered with local tea farmers, bought land, and started his own business. Within a couple of years, he had become both an expert in tea and a small entrepreneur.

That story, to me, represents two entirely different life paths. School, family, and society—each of these systems profoundly shapes our lives. Yet most people unquestioningly accept the supposed “reasonableness” of reality. They believe that once they graduate from university, they automatically become “talent.” They never imagine what a different kind of education—or a different kind of society—might have made of them. They don’t see how society deceives and manipulates them. And by the time they realize how far they’ve drifted from their ideals, it’s already too late. Their lives have been delayed, their minds have regressed.The scholar Zi Zhongyun from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences once said that among all of China’s current problems, the most severe one is education. She is now in her eighties—a highly respected scholar who once headed the Institute of American Studies, and whose husband, Chen Lemin, was also a great academic. Zi Zhongyun said that China’s education, beginning as early as kindergarten, instills a kind of utilitarianism that strangles imagination and creativity.

If this continues, she warned, even the human stock of our nation will degenerate. She compared this process to the rotting of a potato: slow, inevitable, internal decay.

My own teacher at Peking University, Professor Qian Liqun, said something equally striking not long ago. He said that our universities—including Peking University—are now producing a large number of what he called “sophisticated egoists.” These people are intelligent, worldly, smooth, skilled at performance and cooperation, and especially adept at exploiting the system for personal gain. And once such people obtain power, Qian said, their harm to society will be greater than that of the typical corrupt official. Sadly, our education system is mass-producing these poisonous poppies.

If we extend what Zi Zhongyun and Qian Liqun said beyond schools to include family and social education, their conclusions remain just as true. On the surface, the flaws of our school system are the most visible—you can see them immediately, like the difference between my friend’s son and his classmates. Everyone understands that difference. That’s why so many families with means try to send their children abroad for education.

But the harms of family and social education are subtler; they take longer to appear. When young people finally step into society, they are again deceived and misled. Many believe everything is self-determined—that their successes or failures are entirely their own doing.

There’s a common saying: if you’re not doing well, you have only yourself to blame. But in a truly civilized society, this is a false belief. It ignores the fact that individuals have responsibilities toward society—and, more importantly, that society has responsibilities toward them. The most basic of those responsibilities is to ensure that people are free from deprivation and fear. When someone loses their job or suffers from hunger and cold, society bears responsibility.

I remember a detail from the Wenchuan earthquake. A soldier rescued a small child from the rubble and handed her a bottle of water. The first thing she said was, “Uncle, how much does it cost?” When I read that story, I felt such deep sorrow. Because in developed countries, in the face of disaster, the question people ask rescuers is not “how much?” but “why did you come so late?”

That difference reveals something profound. The mentality of our citizens and that of modern civic society are worlds apart. Our society deceives and disqualifies people—it produces both the naïve and the cunning. It breeds, on one side, citizens who are simple-minded and trusting, and on the other, those “sophisticated egoists” Qian described—sharp, selfish, and calculating. The latter even believe that as long as they live comfortably, they are contributing to society. They call this “negative liberty.”

But such people forget that in a country like ours—and indeed in any modern society—life is deeply interdependent. One person’s wellbeing is always tied to that of others. To equate selfishness with freedom is nonsense. This kind of self-centered life reminds me of the poet Zang Kejia’s words: “Some people are alive, yet they are already dead.”

Our society today has far too many such people—refined, selfish citizens without moral depth. But thankfully, no matter how successful they appear, they cannot escape moral judgment. Especially now, in the age of the internet, public opinion—the only effective form of supervision we have—sees them for what they are: arrogant, unethical, stripped of personal and social integrity.

If we look at society as a whole, we can say this: today’s China suffers from two forms of disqualification—the disqualification of the poor and the disqualification of the shrewd. The latter are the nouveau riche, the self-satisfied, the cunningly privileged. But both represent the same loss: the dimming of the mind, the regression of humanity, and the postponement of life.

This is what I mean when I talk about the disqualification of human society. A nation has its dignity; a person has their integrity. If a society loses its integrity, if a nation becomes disqualified, then its people inevitably lose theirs as well. And once we are disqualified, our words and actions begin to exceed the boundaries of decency—what we call “out of line,” or literally, losing the line.

That’s why the internet is full of what people call “most shocking remarks.” They shock us precisely because they cross those boundaries. Why are Chinese people, in today’s world, so easily shocking to others? Because we have lost our qualification—we have forgotten our measure.

Our mainland today suffers not only from unprecedented pollution of its ecology, but also of its mentality and its social temperament. More precisely, these are not merely polluted—they are regressing. Our landscapes, our inner worlds, our moral climate—everything has begun to wither.

Just look at what the artist Wen Dachuan showed us earlier: the rivers and mountains of China are visibly deteriorating. Over the past thirty years of reform and opening, yes, China has changed immensely. One major change is this: many Chinese people now believe they stand on equal footing with the West.

Back in the 1980s, we didn’t think that way. We looked to the West with humility and a genuine desire to learn. People even joked that we were so worshipful of foreign things that we thought “the moon over there was rounder.” But today, we no longer think so. We imagine we have “stood up,” that we can say “no,” that we can afford to be displeased. Some even mock the West for its crises, its politics, its decadence.

I’ve heard many so-called “successful people” tell me, “So what if they’re developed? Developed countries have the same problems we do.” They say, “We have corruption—they have corruption; we have inflation—they have recessions; we have moral decay—they have moral decay.”

Whenever I hear such logic, I feel a deep chill. To think and live this way is to become complicit with degeneration itself. People like this cannot sense the difference between themselves and those who live in truly civilized societies. Yet, ironically, they still have a kind of instinct—a self-preserving instinct. What is it? They send their children abroad. They find ways to emigrate. They may deny the value of the civilized world, but they instinctively seek refuge in it.When we talked about Lu Xun, he brought up Run Tu—the peasant boy who once played with the narrator in childhood but later grew into a silent, hardened man separated by class and consciousness. He said this figure still haunts him because, in his eyes, almost all of us in today’s China have become some version of Run Tu.

“There are two kinds of Run Tu,” he told me. “One is numb and ignorant. The other is clever, selfish, and just as foolish. Both are trapped in the same fate.”

He said we shouldn’t be intoxicated by our so-called well-off material lives. “We need to understand the distance between ourselves and truly civilized people,” he insisted. “The tragedy is that Run Tu never even realizes he has become Run Tu. The clever one doesn’t know his own worth or his moral obligations. The numb one doesn’t know his rights or dignity.”

He told me a young person once asked him, “If I have to set aside my ideals for the next five or ten years to struggle for survival, what should I do?” He admitted that he hadn’t known how to answer. “I feel I’ve already been delayed by this society,” he said. “How could I offer a single, definite solution to the young?”

Then, after a pause, he said, “Maybe it’s enough that we at least know our lives have been delayed. When we have no choice but to work for bread and shelter, we must still protect our own spirit and clarity of mind. We must not let the outside world pollute or destroy us.”

He told me that this was why he wanted to talk to others—to share whatever insight he had gathered from a life that, as he put it, “had already been postponed.” Even in this delayed time, he said, people could still gain something if they learned to see clearly. “The environment may be rotten,” he said, “but at least we should know it is.”

He repeated again and again that he didn’t want people to do harm. “We must not create more evil,” he said quietly. “In our language, we call it not making karma. Don’t commit wrongs.”

Then his tone softened. “In these bitter years—in what people now call a ‘tragic and absurd’ life—we shouldn’t blame heaven or others,” he said. “And we shouldn’t withhold our positive emotions either. We must return to what is bright.” He quoted Churchill: ‘In harsh times, we must never be stingy with praise.’ “That line,” he told me, “has always stayed with me. Whatever happens, it’s enough that we understand.”

He believed that even if our lives have been delayed, even if our minds lag behind by many years, we must still hold on to something of our own—our conscience, our dignity, our rights. “And we must praise,” he said, “praise freedom, civilization, kindness, and justice. Because even the act of praise is a way of resisting decay.”

He told me he had read countless memoirs written by the “sent-down youth” and the scar literature of the 1980s. “I think,” he said, “those generations lived in vain.” Then, almost whispering, he quoted Dostoevsky: ‘The only thing I fear is that I might not be worthy of my own suffering.’

“It’s tragic,” he said. “So many Chinese have suffered, but their suffering was wasted—it taught them nothing, left no transformation, no meaning. It was pain for nothing.”

He looked away when he said this, and after a long silence, he shared one last story. “Marx’s eldest daughter, Jenny,” he began, “once asked the historian Wittek, ‘Can you condense all of human history into one small booklet?’ Wittek replied, ‘No need. Four German proverbs will do.’”

Then he recited them to me slowly:

1. Whom God wishes to destroy, He first lets swell with pride.

2. Time is a sieve; it will eventually wash away all the dregs.

3. When darkness deepens, the stars shine more brightly.

4. And when everything collapses, only what is true remains.

When he finished, he said quietly, “Perhaps this is all we can hope for—to wait until the darkness is complete, so that the faint light can be seen again.”