The prophecies of Xu Zhimo | Lee Yee
Carrie Lam took the initiative to cancel her US visa, and now she has taken another action to renounce her honorary fellowship from Wolfson College of the University of Cambridge. That Facebook post of hers indeed gave us a bit of joy in sorrows. Some proposed, “Please renounce the British citizenship of your husband and two sons as well, in order to demonstrate your loyalty to the country.” There, we could tell where public opinion lies and where the public’s heart is.
To conclude her post, she wrote, “Despite this unpleasant incident, Cambridge University is still a world-renowned university that many aspire to, and Cambridge, under the pen of Mr. Xu Zhimo, still leaves many beautiful memories for my family and me!” As she bids farewell to Cambridge, one can’t help but recall Xu Zhimo’s “Taking Leave of Cambridge Again”.
Xu Zhimo’s Cambridge era was in 1920-21, but I think the most noteworthy moment of his was his tenure as the editor-in-chief of the Morning Supplement from 1925 to 1926. During this period, he discovered great writers such as Shen Congwen, and predicted how the next century would unfold.
The predecessor of Morning News [Shen Bao] was Morning Bell Daily [Shen Zhong Bao], founded by Liang Qichao and Tang Hualong. Morning Bell Daily published novels, poems, essays, and academic speeches in the seventh edition, so Morning News Supplement was initially referred to as the “Seventh Edition of Morning Bell”. Many articles and works of the New Culture Movement, including Lu Xun’s episodic novella, “The True Story of Ah Q”, was published in here. It was one of the three major publications during the May Fourth Cultural Enlightenment Movement. The Chief of Morning News was Chen Bosheng, and the seventh edition was led by Sun Fuyuan, who gave it the name Morning Bell Daily. Until 1924, when Sun Fuyuan left, it was the “golden age” of the propagation of the new culture. During this period, there was the October Revolution of the Soviet Union, which led to the establishment of the first socialist country, and China’s May Fourth Movement, which developed from enlightenment that promoted liberal and democratic ideas to socialism and salvation that catered to the global trend. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was established, and the Kuomintang (KMT) was transformed into a Lenin-style party. Joining forces, the two parties set up the Republic of China Military Academy (ROCMA), to which the Soviet Union sent representatives to participate in preparation for the Northern Expedition to overthrow the most civilized Beiyang regime (aka the Republic of China) in the early days of the establishment of the Republic of China.
At the insistent invitation of Chen Bosheng, the editor-in-chief of the Morning News, Xu Zhimo agreed to serve as the editor-in-chief of the Morning Supplement in early 1925 after his Europe tour. He started to travel by train to Soviet Russia in March, and then off to Europe. At the time, he was carrying the yearning of most Chinese intellectuals, including Hu Shi, for the realization of the ideal of human equality in the Soviet Union, but he had sensitively noticed the gloomy expressions on the faces of Soviet Russians, the sense that they “had no idea what the smile of natural joy” was. He visited Tolstoy’s daughter in Moscow and learned that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky’s books were no longer available. Xu Zhimo then wrote a sharp, honest, literary note, “They believe that Heaven is available and achievable, but between the secular world and Heaven there is a body of water, a sea of blood, and humans must survive crossing this sea before they could reach the other shore. They decided first to realize that sea of blood.”
That was the early years of the establishment of the Soviet Union, when the new regime was praised by intellectuals around the world, and inspired Chinese ideologies. The poet’s keen observation foresaw that this regime under the dictatorship of the proletariat would realize a sea of blood.
After returning to China and took over the Morning News Supplement on October 1, 1925, the first thing Xu Zhimo did was to start a series of discussions around the Soviet-Russian issue in the paper. More than 50 fiercely controversial articles on whether to introduce “friendship” or “hatred” towards Russia. At around 5 p.m. on November 29, the Morning News building in Beijing was set on fire by the protestors, which also burned the discussions to ashes.
Why did Xu Zhimo try so hard to discuss Soviet Russia? He said, “China’s problem with Soviet Russia…to date, it has always been a gangrene that has never been removed nor punctured. The pus inside has gathered to a point where it can no longer be silted, and the hidden chaos is so obvious that we can no longer simply ignore.” Therefore, “the problem this time,…to exaggerate a little, is a problem of China’s national fortune, including all possible perversions in the livelihoods of its countrymen.”
The prophecies of the creation of a sea of blood by the Soviet Union, as well as the Chinese people living in perversions, have all came true. Today, we are not only commemorating Cambridge under the pen of this renowned poet, but we should also remember how the Chinese ignored this prophet’s words, and brought about a disaster that is still continuing a hundred years later.
She bid farewell to Cambridge. But Cambridge would never have tolerated the smearing of these hands, which created a sea of blood anyway.
