Feng Xiang, the Odd Professor: the Bible, Communism, and His Actual Field, Law — What's Going On? | Interviews ⑨

曾梦龙 · · English translation

Plus a fictionalized dialogue based on a real interview. He calls it "A Keepsake for People of the Future — Answering QDaily."

Plus a fictionalized dialogue based on a real interview. He calls it "A Keepsake for People of the Future — Answering QDaily."

Feng Xiang is a bit of an oddball, inside the "circle" and outside it.

His actual field is law, yet he has poured years into translating and interpreting the Bible, and every so often he holds forth on communism — with startling results. In our interview he declared himself ready for a second abolition of private property, except that this time the agent of change won't be industrial workers but artificial intelligence.

In April 2016, at a Shanghai lecture called Oaths and Faith: Starting From the Constitutional Oath, Feng Xiang said something startling.

"Let me venture a bold scenario. In 2049, on the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic, the Chinese government could invite governments around the world to abolish private property a second time, in order to face the dead end of humanity being replaced. That is to say, if we keep running a market economy, keep privatizing, and carry that whole set of moral, ethical and legal principles into the future, it will create enormous problems. It is at exactly this level that communism will recover its powerful vitality and realize what The Communist Manifesto envisioned: revolution breaking out simultaneously in all the advanced nations."

The remarks spread widely online and stirred plenty of argument. But among the many voices criticizing Feng Xiang, few seemed to care about the context, the logic or the evidence behind what he had said.

This October, interviewed by QDaily, Feng Xiang stood by it: "Why not? Getting to communism by way of artificial intelligence may look like a hazy fantasy, but it is the way things are trending — even the front men of the AI industry, the money-raising, cash-burning 'Iron Men,' are talking about planned economies. Communism has been, since ancient times, the general ideal of family life and close friendship among human beings."

Feng Xiang holds the Mei Ruao Chair Professorship in Law at Tsinghua University's School of Law. He has been well known for a long time, having written columns for magazines such as Dushu (《读书》), Wanxiang (《万象》) and Southern Weekly, mostly on the law, religion, ethics and literature he studies. His books and translations include Notes on Law and Politics (《政法笔记》), Wooden-Leg Justice (《木腿正义》), Glass Island (《玻璃岛》), Genesis (《创世纪》), The Five Books of Moses (《摩西五经》), The Song of Isaiah (《以赛亚之歌》) and A Treasury of Sacred Hymns (《圣诗撷英》). Readers who like his writing say it combines "learning with style"; those who don't call it "obscure" and "affected."

Feng Xiang

Once you know Feng Xiang's background, the oddness stops looking odd. His mind is built the way an older generation's minds were built: what he has read and what he cares about carry all the marks of the era he lived through, Chinese learning and Western learning together.

Feng Xiang belongs to China's "educated youth" generation. His father was the well-known philosopher Feng Qi. In 1968 he left Shanghai for Mile County in Yunnan and began nine years of "Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages." He was 15, had not finished middle school, and his life changed course from then on.

That year the People's Daily quoted Mao Zedong's instruction: "It is highly necessary for educated youth to go to the countryside to be re-educated by the poor and lower-middle peasants." The rustication movement then reached its peak, drawing in some 17 million people in all. They came to be known as the educated youth of China's Cultural Revolution.

In Yunnan, Feng Xiang first grew sugarcane on a production team for more than two years, then signed up to teach in a Hani village in Lüchun County. He never stopped reading. He taught himself English and French, grew interested in the languages and cultures of the ethnic minorities around him, and often listened to the BBC and other "enemy stations."

"My outlook on life and my values owe most to the years I spent, tempered by life, among the ethnic minority peoples of the frontier," Feng Xiang wrote in the preface to A Treasury of Sacred Hymns. It was in those years too that, wanting to write down the words of a recording of Handel's Messiah he had heard, he first ran into the Book of Isaiah.

A village in Yunnan

In 1977 China restored the national college entrance exam, and Feng Xiang, then 24, signed up. But Yunnan had a local rule: primary and secondary school teachers applying to study English could only be admitted to teacher-training colleges inside the province. So Feng Xiang ended up in the foreign languages department of Kunming Teachers College. As luck had it, the college then sat on the old campus of the National Southwestern Associated University, and he could read the many Chinese and foreign books left behind in the old collections of Yunnan University and the Associated University.

Five years later he got what he wanted and entered Peking University's Department of Western Languages, studying Old and Middle English under the department chair, Li Funing. In 1984 he went to Harvard for a doctorate in medieval literature, then switched from literature to law, took a J.D. at Yale Law School, and made intellectual property his research field.

"From the mid-1980s on, China's political-legal system began to change. A commodity economy was rebuilt, some of the social control once handled by revolutionary art and literature moved into legal channels, and the language of rule of law gradually joined the mainstream ideology. I studied law partly to follow China's changes during that transition, and partly because China's entire legal framework is an import, read differently in different periods, and in recent decades we have imagined it as an American-style legal system. So why not take the chance to study law at Yale?" Feng Xiang said in an earlier interview.

Yale Law School

Those years of study left Feng Xiang fluent in more than a dozen languages — Greek, Italian, Hebrew, Latin, Old Latin, Old French, Old English, Middle English, Welsh, Old Icelandic, Aramaic and other small or medieval Western tongues — and gave him a stock of "obscure" allusions that shows plainly in his later writing. His prose is also "influenced by classical Chinese"; Zhu Suli, a professor at Peking University Law School, calls it "concise, polished, archaic, colloquial, and free of long sentences."

Feng Xiang finished his law degree in 1993. He taught for six years in the law department of the University of Hong Kong, then went back to the United States to practice law on intellectual property and competitive intelligence, translating and writing on the side and running columns in the press. Only in 2010 did he formally return to teach at Tsinghua.

In between, the column "Notes on Law and Politics," which he wrote at the invitation of Wang Hui — a Tsinghua professor and then editor-in-chief of Dushu — had great influence in China. It changed how many people understood the word zhengfa, "political-legal," and named the elephant in the room. For plenty of readers back then, his Notes on Law and Politics and Wooden-Leg Justice were their first introduction to legal studies.

Feng Xiang's books

In Feng Xiang's view, zhengfa in Chinese is not shorthand for "politics and law" at all; the weight falls on the first word. He says so plainly in his books: "law is politics's evening gown, or new clothes that constantly need a photo shoot"; "law is still working hard to become the language of capital and the tool of power"; "law is, in essence, a strategy of social control by which a discourse of power rewrites history and papers over substantive contradictions with procedural technique." The questions running underneath include: what is the point of legal-literacy campaigns? While China studies Western law so energetically, what should it do with its own homegrown resources for rule of law?

Zhu Suli once wrote, in an essay called The Evolution of the Landscape of Chinese Legal Scholarship: "In the Notes on Law and Politics Feng Xiang published in 2003, he examined the practice of contemporary Chinese law from the vantage point of zhengfa, with an almost pitiless eye, and remade zhengfa — a word China's legal academy had spent 25 years avoiding entirely — into an important and intellectually rich angle of scholarly inquiry."

That new angle also produced the split between legal dogmatics and the social-science approach to law. The first leans politically right, the second left. Some people take Feng Xiang for a representative figure of the New Left in legal scholarship: keen to criticize capitalism, doubtful of "universal values" and of an abstract rule of law grounded in individual rights and procedural justice, on the grounds that both assume capitalism is the end of history. Dong Yanbin, a researcher at the Institute of Law of Southwest University of Political Science and Law, wrote in an essay called Why Are the Idols Fading? An Analysis of the Legal Scholarship of Zhu Suli, Feng Xiang and Huang Zongzhi: "Feng Xiang often uses the figure of the Trojan horse, and perhaps he plays the Trojan horse himself. He knows the law well and tries to see through to reality, mocking the most rigid parts of China's existing order — but that is only the horse he lives inside. In the horse's belly is his New Left feeling, laughing in the face of capital."

Feng Xiang himself doesn't quite accept the description. He prefers to say he admires the critical stance of Kennedy, Unger and the others in Harvard's Critical Legal Studies movement. "Without criticism there is no scholarly progress. For me it's probably just temperament — since I was a child I've liked going against the current and desecrating the 'sacred,' ha. You could also call it an intellectual's conscience," Feng Xiang told QDaily.

Feng Xiang teaching

That taste for going against the current and desecrating the sacred, on top of everything he has since learned, is what makes Feng Xiang look unlike his colleagues — though plenty of people in legal academia share his background. Where others talk about introducing readers to law and spreading legal literacy, he holds that "today's legal education is, on the whole, a failure, because it carries on the old legal lineage, old thinking, old life and old figures from before Liberation"; that "the new rule of law (formal rule of law) has been in place for years now. Its daily operation and its ideological function have been, it must be said, very successful — successful at cultivating the middle class's expectations of it, and so at absorbing and dissolving the believers' endless resentment"; and that "this highly 'industrialized,' ideologized legal education of mainstream jurisprudence, plus an academic system thoroughly bureaucratized and breeding corruption, has in the end produced nothing but the colonization and Americanization of Chinese legal scholarship as a whole."

This year Feng Xiang published two new books on the Bible at once, The Song of Isaiah and A Treasury of Sacred Hymns. That is one of the fields he knows best: law and religion. The classical ethics and the ideal of a free personality these religious works reveal stand in sharp contrast to the Chinese realities he attacks — the state of university education, academic corruption, the collapse of professional ethics.

Because he was "too busy" and unwilling to be interviewed in person or by phone, we could only put 30 questions to Feng Xiang by email.

His unconventionality held to the end. He rewrote the format of the questions and turned the piece into a fictionalized dialogue. It is not what we originally had in mind, but it has a style of its own. So we print it in full.

Feng Xiang, source: ideobook

A Keepsake for People of the Future — Answering QDaily

Q = QDaily

F = Feng Xiang

Q: Professor Feng, I'm a reporter with QDaily. I'd like to interview you about the Bible, legal studies and yourself. It may run a bit long — would that be all right?

F: Ha, when you got in touch and I saw the name "QDaily," I thought: right, new things for young people, I'm out of date! Fine, go ahead.

Q: Thank you. Could we start with your two new books, The Song of Isaiah and A Treasury of Sacred Hymns? The dedication page of the first reads, "To Yufen, my elder sister-in-law from a Yi family, a doctor of the people." I'm curious — who is she? Could you tell her story?

F: A good friend, for decades now. Maybe I'll write her story someday when I have time; but memory is an old man's privilege and should be spent sparingly. It was a turbulent, momentous age, hard for people used to "small" things nowadays to imagine.

Q: That must be quite a story. A Treasury of Sacred Hymns is a selection of sacred hymns — I'm reading it now, and it feels unlike the poetry we're used to. For ordinary readers, what is the value of sacred hymns, and how should one read them?

F: In faith, in knowledge, in literature and art, from ancient times to now, their influence has been enormous. By "unlike," you probably mean the cast of thought in the verse, and that in itself is a whole field of study. But scripture is not easy to read; you have to work it over again and again, since it is after all the religious canon and the historical record of ancient Israel. So with every revision I add notes based on student feedback and readers' letters, hoping to help readers, believers included, study and understand it.

Q: On the Bible, you have now published close to ten works of writing and translation. I found Peng Lun's interview with you online (in the appendix to The Five Books of Moses), and it is packed with detail. It says that while you were at Yale Law School you found no shortage of mistranslations, omissions and stylistic problems in the Chinese Union Version, and decided to translate the scriptures yourself. But the preface to The Song of Isaiah raises the question of "whether a new heaven, a new earth and a new human ethics are possible" — a "hard problem" like that suggests your goal was more than translation. Is that right?

F: Translating and glossing scripture began as a professional interest. But beyond interpreting the sacred word and building literature, I have also tried to answer some theoretical questions — for instance, how to regard the legacy of twentieth-century revolution. I have taught the course several times in recent years and gathered some thoughts, which I develop in these two books; see the exegetical essays starting with "On Sin," along with the introductions and notes to the hymns.

These days I have also come to feel that translating scripture is a way of leaving something behind for the people of the future. Machine translation advances by the day, and with fragmented reading on mobile screens and machine-assembled web writing already the trend, surely no one will do this kind of work later on. They won't have the ability, and there will be no need.

An old edition of the Bible

Q: Ten years ago, in an interview with a Hong Kong reporter I believe, it came out that you are not a Christian. Is that still true? Why? How do you see the relationship between religious faith and translating scripture?

F: In the West, asking someone's religious affiliation is as much a social taboo as asking a woman's age. But people here ask often enough, so I have to needle them a little: are you from the police station checking household registrations? The late Ren Jiyu used to say that studying religion requires stepping outside its doctrines and creeds. In Europe and America, including at mainstream seminaries, that is a basic scholarly stance. University classrooms should follow the constitutional principle of separating church and state, and public education should hold to secularism (laïcité). The Regulations on Religious Affairs, recently revised and issued by the State Council, said exactly this again — putting things back on the right track, and very timely.

Among Chinese-language Christians, believers translating scripture on their own is rare. Every denomination has its "official" version, and some even set up bodies to revise it. A believer ought to hold to the doctrinal position of his own denomination, rather than endorse or spread the views of a rival denomination (a "heresy") or of the academy, and make trouble for the church. You see, preaching and scholarship are two different things and shouldn't be confused.

Q: You are a law professor, yet you study religion. There is a subject ordinary readers may not know much about — the relationship between law and religion. Could you say more?

F: Many of the rules and principles of modern Western rule of law can be traced back to the Bible and to medieval Christian tradition. But that is historical background, not the focus of our study.

"Law and Religion" is a course I have taught at Tsinghua for nine years now. Besides the Bible, it requires reading Marx and Lenin, and reading modern scholarship and case law. The syllabus puts it this way: the main task is to start from the different legal traditions, religious ethics and political theologies that scripture reveals, originates or symbolizes, and examine the decline of formal rule of law in China and its symptoms — the crisis of faith, religious freedom and religious conflict, frontier and ethnic questions, the forgetting and rewriting of history, the will to sacrifice alongside the remaking of utopia, and, as global capitalism enters an era of low-rule-of-law competition, the prospects for rebuilding human ideals and values.

The students who take it seem to like it; they say it often gives them the feeling of having their minds blown open.

A classroom at Tsinghua

Q: I see, that's a lot packed in. Is the workload heavy?

F: At the end of the course students hand in a paper on a topic of their own choosing, discussed with the instructor.

Q: I hear you also teach "Law and Ethics," with particular stress on rebuilding professional ethics. In China's actual context, what does "rebuilding" mean? Where does the urgency come from?

F: It really is urgent. China's system, its real constitutional order, is quite unlike the West's; professional ethics is rooted in political ethics, which is to say the ethics of the party's vanguard. The first collapsed because the second grew slack, and it cannot be rebuilt on its own. So the first step is fighting corruption: investigation and rectification by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the founding of the National Supervisory Commission, breaking through the boundaries the constitutional order draws on paper, and unifying leadership — that is exactly one milestone in all the work since the 18th Party Congress. And because this concerns party building, one must show the resolve to be "always on the road," and declare that promise to the whole nation.

Q: Speaking of "on the road" — how do you think China's legal education should improve? A few years ago, in a lecture at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, you said: "Today's legal education is, on the whole, a failure ... it carries on the old legal lineage, old thinking, old life and old figures from before Liberation." What exactly has gone wrong?

F: Heh, I call it old jurisprudence — "on the outside a few shiny new foreign-brand labels stuck on, all bright and colorful ... peel them back and there's a smell of mold." There are plenty of problems: dogmatism running wild, public morality cheapened, professional ethics dissolved, and it is anti-democratic besides. That essay, Dialogue at the Hall of Deng Xi, spells it out clearly, so I won't repeat it. Realistically, though, it is fine if legal education doesn't change. Once students graduate, leave campus and touch reality, they hand the whole pile of dogma straight back to their teachers. It's only that this fact ought to be known to all of society.

Q: Yes, that's the dialogue. As an outsider to legal studies, I sense a split between two schools behind this — legal dogmatics on one side, and the social-science approach to law, which you seem closer to, on the other. Where does the split lie? What does it do to reality? And why do you side with the social-science approach?

F: Some people describe legal academia as a martial-arts world, full of rival schools. Dogmatics belongs to the mainstream; it is the textbook standard. But let me clarify: I don't accept the general premises of popular (Western) social science, or its disguised "objective neutrality." Scholarship should mean critical thinking, and criticizing is more fun than dutifully serving an apprenticeship, isn't it? That critique of ours in Wuhan — I said this in the Dialogue — was just picking a school with a big name and a knack for pulling in national research grants and having some fun with it, not because it is especially useless, or more detached from reality and more misleading to students than any other school.

Poster for the film *The Story of Qiu Ju*, source: Douban

Q: In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when you wrote Notes on Law and Politics, some of your lines were unforgettable, even startling: "law is politics's evening gown"; "law ... is still working hard to become the language of capital and the tool of power, still showing its pink, tender claws"; "modern rule of law is, in essence, a strategy of social control that rewrites history through a discourse of rights and hides substantive contradictions behind procedural technique." Would you say a word or two about those?

F: Maybe they were a bit ahead of their time? These past few years, students and teachers often tell me they loved reading Notes on Law and Politics at school, but on rereading it now they see they hadn't really understood it then. What satisfies me most is that zhengfa, a word once looked down on, is now an accepted homegrown academic concept.

Q: In your view, what are the biggest problems on China's future path toward rule of law? How should they be solved? Your writing seems to put great weight on grassroots democracy.

F: The new rule of law (formal rule of law) has been in place for years now. Its daily operation and its ideological function have been, it must be said, very successful — successful at cultivating the middle class's expectations of it, and so at absorbing and dissolving the believers' endless resentment. And as long as people go on muddling along, lining up to ask "what's the biggest problem" and "how do we solve it," rule of law is doing its work of screening and soothing.

Democracy is different; it is the Communist Party's traditional slogan. Inner-party democracy, grassroots democracy, mass democracy, Western electoral democracy — all of them involve constraining, overcoming and going beyond formal rule of law, which is why the "disputes" never stop and why development is urgently needed. Today, facing the all-round challenge of the coming smart economy and its data oligarchs, whether humanity can escape enslavement by capital depends on the progress of our substantive democracy, which means educating, mobilizing and organizing the people.

Q: Professor Feng, last year you gave a lecture in Shanghai looking ahead at artificial intelligence. Reports online said you believe that under capitalism AI research is extremely prone to running out of control, bringing enormous risk. But why would that make "communism once again a real option for the development of human society"? You even ventured that the advanced nations, as The Communist Manifesto describes, might act together, with revolution breaking out simultaneously — "a second abolition of private property." Do you still hold that view?

F: Why not? Getting to communism by way of artificial intelligence may look like a hazy fantasy, but it is the way things are trending — even the front men of the AI industry, the money-raising, cash-burning "Iron Men," are talking about planned economies.

Communism has been, since ancient times, the general ideal of family life and close friendship among human beings, just as cooperative labor and shared harvests are part of human "nature," or an advantage for the survival of the species. In the internet age this "glow of human nature" has only grown brighter: the thriving culture of the commons online, the volunteer labor of young subtitle groups, and the brave Aaron Swartz publishing the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, undaunted by capital's frenzied crackdown. Facing all that is a string of unavoidable consequences of the smart economy: the whole of society growing dependent on smart terminals, a widening class divide, wealth, markets and means of production concentrated ever more tightly, mass unemployment forcing developed countries into universal welfare, and so on. When that day comes, if humanity is not willing to sink into degradation, the only way out is to rise up in revolution and bring the underlying data of the internet of things, intelligent technology and capital into public ownership. Otherwise there is no way to build a new, sustainable ethics of human and machine.

Remaking utopia this way means walking the "narrow road that leads to life" (Matt. 7:14), and the reasoning is simple. Think about it: the other road is smooth and easy, but if capitalist private ownership runs all the way to the end, what does it crash into? Robots replacing human beings across the board? Or the dictatorship of the data oligarchs? Or the two joining forces to "keep" as pets the robots' "pets" (in Steve Wozniak's words) — those countless bored citizens living off welfare?

Feng Xiang, source: tsingdata

Q: If the future really looks like that, then people will have no choice but to choose communism.

F: Well put — those words "no choice." Humanity will come to accept communism "through the achievements science has reached." That teaching of Lenin's prophesied the future of private property.

Q: The rise of artificial intelligence must also be a severe challenge to the legal profession?

F: First of all, mass unemployment; it will reach every industry, and law firms, courts and government departments will be no exception. American scholars and think tanks have predicted that more than half of legal rules will be replaced by big-data algorithms and blockchain. Artificial intelligence will be the terminator of traditional legal practice.

Q: You say "terminator," which makes me think of your own specialty in law, intellectual property. In a 2011 lecture you said that two globalizing currents, the internet and business outsourcing, would bring intellectual property to an end. How should we understand a change that large?

F: Oh, that wasn't a lecture, it was a keynote at an international conference, originally in English. You young people feel the end of intellectual property most keenly: how would you get through the day without pirated and knockoff goods, without infringing, without jumping the firewall? But this "end," or the law's failure and unenforceability for most people, does not mean that property rights over abstract things and the turning of personhood into a commodity have stopped working or vanished. The truth is the opposite: among the big companies — Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei, Hollywood and the e-commerce giants, plus countless "cockroach patent" firms — intellectual property suits are fought every day. Capital depends entirely on intellectual property to monopolize markets and run litigation shakedowns.

Q: Professor Feng, some scholars call you the representative figure of Harvard Critical Legal Studies in China. Do you accept that?

F: I wouldn't presume. But I do admire the critical stance of Kennedy, Unger and the others (see Those Who Survived and Those Who Were Sacrificed).

Without criticism there is no scholarly progress. For me it's probably just temperament — since I was a child I've liked going against the current and desecrating the "sacred," ha. You could also call it an intellectual's conscience. Some things are hard for the people concerned to say out loud — that young faculty, the "green peppers," are under crushing pressure, for instance — so those of us who are older have a duty to step forward and say a few words, to poke at the emperor's new clothes.

Feng Xiang at a lectern

Q: Back to A Treasury of Sacred Hymns. In the preface you say, "My outlook on life and my values owe most to the years I spent, tempered by life, among the ethnic minority peoples of the frontier." Could you talk about that time? There must be a lot of stories.

F: I've written several already; they're in Glass Island and Genesis, and in "Luoga," the opening piece of The Song of Isaiah. My readers know these stories well. So the moment I saw the interview outline I knew the reporter was new to this — no harm done, of course.

Q: My apologies. But I would still like to know: you studied at Peking University, Harvard and Yale in turn. What did those experiences do to you?

F: Not much, intellectually. My generation is called the Old Three Classes, the middle- and high-school students swept up in the Cultural Revolution; I was the youngest of them, just starting seventh grade. We were sent down to the countryside first, settled in villages on Yunnan's frontier, re-educated by the poor and lower-middle peasants, and only sat the college entrance exam after the Cultural Revolution ended — and only the somewhat luckier ones, a tiny few, what the prophets called the "remnant" (Isa. 1:9, 10:22), got the chance to go to university. By then my whole outlook had already been destroyed once and rebuilt.

So I very much encourage our students to go down to the grassroots, to spend a few years in frontier regions and hard places, learn from ordinary people, shift their standpoint and seek progress. Only afterward should they take the graduate exam, study abroad, or join a state enterprise, an investment bank, an international organization, whatever. Life is the best teacher.

Q: You left China early and lived in the United States a long time. But in 2010 you came back and joined Tsinghua. How did you reach that decision?

F: In fact I had started teaching courses in 2009 — the exchange and cooperation with the law school never stopped from the day the school was founded. Generally speaking, teaching and bringing up students as a vocation is better done in China, or East Asia, than elsewhere; that is one great strength of the Confucian tradition. But in coming back to serve, beyond my academic aims, I also had in mind that line from Lu Xun's madman, "save the children." The universities have sunk and turned corrupt — what can we do about it? Both my parents were old Tsinghua people, from before the War of Resistance, so perhaps this is a kind of fate too, a chance to repay a debt.

The Tsinghua campus

Q: A few more small questions, Professor Feng. Do you follow the news much day to day? Looking back over the past year, which news events left a deep impression?

F: I only skim the headlines quickly. As for news, what I keep watching is the progress of machine-generated news. In the United States, real-time coverage of things like sports and finance is already quite mature.

Q: Who has influenced you the most?

F: I'm not much influenced by other people.

Q: What are you busy with lately?

F: Writing.

Q: What question have you been thinking about most lately?

F: The ethics of human and machine.

Q: What is the biggest change you feel in yourself over these past few years?

F: My ear has grown compliant, just as Confucius said.

Q: Is there anything lately you would especially like to share?

F: The two books we've talked about today, The Song of Isaiah and A Treasury of Sacred Hymns.

Q: In your view, who are the most important people in driving our era's progress?

F: Laborers, all the "wretched" under private ownership, les damnés de la terre, as The Internationale sings.

Q: Do you have any advice for this society, or anything you especially worry about?

F: Mass unemployment. It is closing in.

Q: In everyday life, what wakes your curiosity?

F: Plenty of things, really. As the Western saying goes: curiosity killed the cat.

Q: What advice do you have for young people today?

F: Unite (see The National Anthem Bestows Freedom).

Written at Tsinghua Garden, National Day / Mid-Autumn Festival, 2017

Cover image from: pixabay

Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.