Day of True National Revitalization

Posted on April 13, 2009

You persistently delete, so I’ll just repost. Words can be deleted, but the facts won’t be deleted along with them. This process will be repeated for a long time, until the day arrives when we evolve, and facts and truth are no longer important to everyday life, so we can forget as we please. 

It’s not difficult to see that the main similarity in the endless disasters occurring on this plot of land takes the concealing of facts as an important component. The distortion and concealing of basic facts—what happened, how it happened, and why it happened—has become the most sincere, most valuable, and most productive effort this race has ever put forth. The truth is always terrible, unfit for presentation, unspeakable, and difficult for the people to handle; just speaking the truth would be “subversion of the state.” Concealing and lying are the foundation ensuring our society’s survival. On the day that truth manifests itself, the sky will brighten; that would be true liberation. 

Like an earthquake lake, no matter how great your disaster is, each one is made up of convergent pools of smaller disasters; they are the foundation of this “revitalized nation.” Once this foundation has been excavated, there won’t be any disasters, and it would be hard to revitalize the nation. We can say that all the concealed facts, altered names, torn out records, erased photographs, destroyed videos, deleted words, sealed mouths, and the “stability” that constrains the truth, all are for a better tomorrow, or in order to gather sufficient energy for an even greater disaster, which will undoubtedly be the true day of the people’s long-awaited national revitalization. 

“Disasters revitalize a nation” (Duo nan xing bang) is a patriotic idiom meant to inspire a nation faced with tragedy with the courage to surmount difficulties. The concept can be traced back to the Chronicles of Zuo (Zuozhuan) from the fourth century BCE, and was famously employed by General Li Hongzhang (1871-1895) in the late Qing period in reference to the invading foreign powers in China. Purposefully, Premier Wen Jiabao invoked the same saying again during a Sichuan classroom visit after the earthquake, where high school students were especially worried because of the approaching Gaokao (national-level college entrance exams). They were given a few extra weeks to prepare for the exam, and when Wen visited them, he wrote these four characters on the blackboard in an effort to inspire them.

TRANSLATED BY LEE AMBROZY