Lao Daoyan on 2024 and Renewal

Lao Dongyan, “My 2024, in which I Learned to Start Over,”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Lao Dongyan (b. 1974) is a Professor of Law at Tsinghua University.  In recent years she has become outspoken on a number of issues, perhaps beginning with her opposition to the use of face-recognition technology in the Beijing subway, on which she published a long, well-argued blog post in 2019 (translation available here).  More recently, she has denounced self-censorship on issues such as the death of 13 students in a fire in a school in Henan (see here for more information), among other things.  Lao is not someone I follow, and I will not attempt here to put together a detailed chronology of what she has written and what reactions to her posts have been, but she is clearly someone who, like Sun Liping, sees herself as a truth-teller.  In addition, she is a law professor in a country that professes to follow the rule of law, which gives her a certain moral authority to comment on the world around her.  She is also a mother, and has written charmingly about how she has learned to raise her children (see here; I might translate this if I find the time).
 
The text translated here is very personal, and recounts Lao’s struggles in mid-career, the despondency, burnout, and depression caused by online spittle wars and above all by finding that her values no longer match the spirit of the times.  She does not elaborate either on her own values or the spirit of the times but looking at her writings and interventions over the past few years, it is not hard to understand what she means:  the people are being ignored and manipulated by huge systems beyond their control, systems that mobilize online pressure against those that speak out. 
 
Lao worked through her issues, in part by spending a sabbatical year in Canada, which gave her the space and the peace to recover the joy of working hard, the results of which had brought her too much pain in China.  There is a deep if obvious truth here:  the only way out a feeling of meaninglessness is to create meaning, which for a scholar means returning to the keyboard and getting your fingers moving. 
 
Lao’s message is ultimately a quiet recommitment to activism, to her truth and values.  People like her give me hope for the future, China’s and ours. 
 
Translation
 
One
 
For me, 2024 was a year of self-healing, a year of rediscovering myself and starting over. After the despondency of 2022 and 2023, one might say that I finally recovered some vitality.
 
Looking back at the course of my life, 2022 stands out as a turning point. The experience completely destroyed the way I used to think to the point that I lost all my illusions. Looking back, these one-sided illusions I had nourished constituted the internal motivation for all the work I invested in my career, and they also gave me an incurable optimism about the future. But in the blink of an eye, my entire inner world collapsed, giving me a strong sense of the eclipse of meaning.
 
The upside is that this was a new experience for me; in my life to this point I had been guileless and positive. The downside is that when you lose your sense of meaning at my age, you have to choose between getting out of the game or plunging back in and renewing yourself, which means pulling yourself back from the brink. I am no longer young, but neither am all that old, and I don’t want to fake it for what remains of my career. 
 
I spent more than half of 2024 in Toronto, using sabbatical leave saved up over eight years. I couldn't wait to be elsewhere, because things had gotten so bad that everything seemed meaningless and I had no energy for anything, including my academic work, other than taking care of the basic requirements of teaching. 
 
Changing the environment was itself a part of self-healing. In my year in Toronto, I lived a secluded life, visiting the same two or three places every day, with almost no social interaction and no interest in traveling or seeing the sights. Happily, I have started to recover, and my gray moods are fading away. I began to find meaning in doing things even if I had to force myself, suppressing frequent bouts of anxiety and frustration.  I also wrote a few academic papers, my reward for the year away.
 
Two
 
In addition to self-healing, 2024 was also a year of re-discovering myself.
 
In terms of my career development, everything had gone smoothly for a long time and then I suddenly ran into constant obstacles.  The problem, viewed superficially, seemed to be that I publicly shared some opinions that deviated from the mainstream, but in fact the problem was not that I had changed but that the mainstream had moved on. 
 
When the value structure of an individual is out of sync with the mood of the times, the friction of incompatibility will inevitably cause a sense of dull pain and helplessness. The pain may not be acute, and the sense of helplessness may not so bad as to merit despair, but as time goes on, the individual’s determination suffers. When you are caught up in this, the exhaustion produced by the seemingly never-ending pressure makes the idea of giving up attractive, because if you let go of your ego, the pain of not fitting in will subside immediately.  It’s like the battle between Don Quixote and the windmill - when there is no hope of winning, it is better to simply lay down your weapons and give up the fight.
 
The problem was that I couldn’t convince myself to give up. This meant in turn that I had to make a great effort to keep myself from being changed.  For the same reason, I was deeply moved when I read a passage from the book Our Vast World[2] which talked about "the risks a person must take in order to reject the fate of spiritual depravity, and the courage, determination, and luck a person needs to maintain their basic goodness."
 
In daily life I am low-key and modest person, but the impression I give on the Internet is quite different. Last year, two friends pointed this out to me. One was someone I had known for many years, and the other was someone I met for the first time. This latter has been involved in United Front work for many years and should be quite experienced in judging people.
 
To tell the truth, I had never before noticed this difference between how I present myself in real life and online. In both cases, I do my best to be sincere, and I don't deliberately put on a persona or say things I don’t believe. So which of the two images is the real me?  It seems that both are, but they represent different aspects of myself.
 
For many years, when things did not go well my habit was to look inward and search for something I had done wrong.  This began to change when I read something Liu Qing 柳青 (b. 1978, chief executive of Didi Chuxing, China’s Uber) published on International Women's Day a few years ago which said, in a nutshell, that women who overthink things at work have a hard time building their self-confidence.  After this I consciously sought to change my behavior.  I do not lack self-confidence, but I do find that being low-key and modest can easily lead others to underestimate me (this is especially true because women often appear to lack self-confidence).  Moreover, in the eyes of some people, being low-key and modest is synonymous with being weak and susceptible to being bullied. So today I have a different attitude, one well expressed by Sister Cha[3] 衩姐in a WeChat post: "Don't overthink things unless it is really necessary, because  reflecting on yourself usually just leaves room for others to get ahead."
 
That said, the difference between the two images drove me to reflect on whether it was part of my basic personality or instead was because I am a woman. In the latter case, it would be because I know that high-profile, showy women are not popular in Chinese society, so I could have gradually disciplined myself in the process of socialization and cultivated a low-key, modest personality.  In so doing, I would blend in and avoid unnecessary harm. Looking back, I really didn't have such a strong character when I was young, and I didn't care about how others viewed me, or if those around me liked me.
 
In 2024, I experienced a higher degree of organized cyber violence than ever before. Clearly, this violence bothered me, but not as seriously as I had expected. Some things seem terrifying before you go through them, but once you have done so you find that they are nothing special, which in turn makes you realize that you have a valuable quality - a relatively strong psychological capacity for forbearance. Such a discovery is surprising and is also part of the process of re-discovering yourself.
 
Having experienced the last wave of cyber violence, it no longer bothers me when people troll me; it barely affects me, to say nothing of actually injuring me. So now I think that I’ve been quite resilient all along and that latent human potential is unlimited. If there is another wave of cyber-violence, it definitely will not hurt me. If you stay calm and refuse to take the bait, you can minimize the negative impact.
 
Three
 
2024 was a year of starting over.
 
In the past few years I have become increasingly aware that I am not a pure scholar.
My interests are more in social governance, and the research I do in that vein will be embedded in a framework of good laws and good governance. Law is a hands-on discipline that intervenes in real life, and pure academic research doesn’t provide me with enough pleasure and motivation. Doing things should mean something, and when the sense of meaning is lost, motivation disappears. If hard work yields nothing, why should I keep doing it?  I can't help but have such questions.
 
Since I finished my Ph.D. in 2004 and started teaching, there has never been a year like 2022-2023 that made me lose the motivation to do academic research. For about a year and a half, I struggled with anxiety, frustration and depression. I had no energy to read academic books, let alone write scholarly papers.
 
I had decided to give up on a paper on women-trafficking that I completed with difficulty in 2022 when the deadline for submission arrived. The advice of a teacher whom I respect as both a colleague and a friend made me change my mind.
 
He spoke to me with rare seriousness, saying:   “You should not treat this paper as just any old piece some journal commissioned. The Xuzhou chained woman incident will definitely become a historic event. The Chinese criminal law community needs to speak out on the crime of trafficking in abducted women. If you don't submit this paper, when we look back on things it will seem like the mainstream view of the criminal law community was that there was no problem either with the legislation or the jurisprudence.” I sent in the paper at the last minute.
 
That paper took almost my last drop of energy. Things got worse for at least another year, due to my loss of internal motivation.  Things started to change when I wrote a paper on cyber violence. By that point, I was already a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto, where the change in environment allowed me to calm down and complete my paper on "How Criminal Law Should Deal with Cyber ​​Violence." With that, my energy for research returned, and I wrote a series of papers on the criminal aspects of illegal business operations.
 
I have always been more interested in research in the basic theory of criminal law, because it is more theoretically challenging and allows me to make use of my talents.   As I rediscovered a sense of meaning I chose to focus on more current and concrete issues, and to write with an eye toward practical applications.  Positioning myself this way may not influence the main thrust of my work, but it will be worth it if it influences the handling of specific cases.
 
After I published my series of papers on illegal business operation, a lawyer told me that he used the arguments in my article in defending a similar case. Another judge in Shanghai told me that they recently tried a case of an illegal business operation, and that his viewpoint was the same as mine.   He also believed that the crime in question was in the preparation stage, so that the defendant involved was given a lighter punishment.
 
It is hard to tell if I have really put the recent difficult period behind me. However, once I learned to look at myself from a historical perspective and gave up my obsession with actual results, I did feel a certain sense of relief. In any case, if you want to avoid falling into a state of learned helplessness, you should choose to continue work hard on those areas where you can. Working hard in and of itself can lead to hope and change.
 
My greatest comfort over the past year has been interactions with people outside legal circles, which have led to me discover that people in different fields have similar concerns about society and are still working hard in different ways; those scattered points of light are the hope for the future.
 
Finally, I would like to end my summary of 2024 with a passage from the journalist and business writer Wu Xiaobo's 吴晓波(b. 1968) New Year's Eve speech. I shed tears on reading it:
 
Sometimes the world is full of malice, but this does not prevent us from remaining kind;
 
Sometimes the world is plunged into vulgarity and idiots hold forth in every corner, but this does not prevent us from having the courage to think independently;
 
Sometimes the hostility of this world will make people feel breathless with despair, but this does not prevent us from still yearning for the sunshine of tomorrow;
 
Sometimes, the world will only applaud the powerful, but this does not prevent us from believing in morality and the power of the people;
 
Sometimes we will feel powerless, and no matter how hard we try, we may get nothing, but this does not prevent us from still making progress every day, and our efforts will not be in vain;
 
Sometimes ordinary and cowardly people like you and me will also be as stubborn as Sisyphus.
 
Notes 

[1]劳东燕,  “我的2024，学会重新出发,” originally published on Lao’s own WeChat page, 水木网络法学, on January 1, 2025, and subsequently reprinted in many venues.
 
[2]Translator’s note:  Our Vast World is my translation of Renshi cangmang/人世苍莽, a book published by The Paper 澎湃新闻in 2024, a collection of xw interest stories from The Paper’s publications in that year.

[3]Translator’s note:  Sister Cha is one of the pen-names used by Wang Xin 王欣 (b. 1982), a well-known writer and blogger whose themes often include self-help.