Zhao Gang, Radical Youth in Taiwan and Hong Kong

Zhao Gang, “Why is this Generation of Young People so Easily Tricked?  The Thoughts of a Professor from Taiwan.”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Zhao Gang (b. 1957) is a professor of sociology at Donghai University in Taiwan.  Although he appears to be an engaged public intellectual who has written several interesting books over the course of his career (see a brief CV in Chinese here), he has not been on my radar, and I chose this text less because of the author than because of the topic:  “radical youth and youth violence” in Taiwan and Hong Kong. 
 
Hong Kong and Taiwan are of course very important issues for China’s central leadership, and CCP views of the topics are expressed frequently in major propaganda organs, but establishment intellectuals rarely address these issues because there is little or no room for “discussion.”  Although I could well have missed something, I cannot recall seeing any texts touching on Hong Kong or Taiwan on my WeChat feed over the past couple of years, so I was surprised when Zhao’s text appeared twice on my feed this week (I don’t know if this was the result of a technical glitch or if Zhao’s text generated  a certain buzz).  The context for the publication of Zhao’s essay was the Sixth National Security Education Day (April 15), which led to a flurry of texts treating education and the humanities (see here and here for examples) in the context of “national security,” one suggesting, for example, that a reason certain East Asian countries have fallen into the “middle-income trap” is that too many students choose to study humanities rather than sciences.

Zhao’s text is similar in that he blames the violence and radicalism of students in Taiwan and Hong Kong on the thoroughly Western and politically correct way the humanities are taught in the major universities of Taiwan and Hong Kong, more specifically on the rise of what he calls “embodied knowledge” (identity politics, the idea that “the personal is political”).  Zhao agrees with embodied knowledge’s critique of “disembodied knowledge” (i.e., old-fashioned, “unengaged” scholarship that respects disciplinary norms), but argues that all of this has been inappropriately imposed on students in “Third World” Taiwan and Hong Kong, leaving them adrift.  He takes them to task for what he sees as the logical contradiction of their having embraced both “embodied knowledge” (i.e., the street politics of their specific localities) and “disembodied knowledge (i.e., the “universal” values of freedom and democracy).  In Zhao’s eyes, the Western humanities are simply part of a larger scheme to shore up Western hegemony.  He calls for a “knowledge project” that will remake Chinese humanities and social sciences in such a way that the youth of Taiwan and Hong Kong can better understand, and thus escape, their pain and anguish.

For what it’s worth, I personally find Zhao’s text unconvincing.  I am not sure that Hong Kong and Taiwan belong to the Third World, nor that the contradiction between embodied and disembodied knowledge is more acute there than elsewhere.  The call to remake Chinese humanities and social sciences is a thinly veiled call to embrace “Chineseness,” but Zhao explains neither what this is nor how it is to bridge the divide between embodied and disembodied knowledge and return the youths to “wholeness.” 
 
A more sympathetic reading of Zhao’s text is nonetheless possible.  At various points in his text, Zhao mentions the Taiwanese left-wing writer and activist Chen Yingzhen (1937-2016), who is much better known in the Chinese-speaking world than in the West.  Born in poverty, Chen came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, under the extremely illiberal Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek, when Taiwan was a backwater, much shaped by American Cold War politics (including the “disembodied knowledge” that was surely taught in Taiwan’s universities at the time).  Chen’s fiction, mirroring that of his inspiration, Lu Xun, depicts the bleakness of the social and intellectual landscape of a poor, small island vainly claiming to be “China” while being largely the creature—even the plaything—of the United States.  In his fiction, Chen often mocks Taiwanese intellectuals (and thus himself) for their pathetic posturing—they seem incapable, to use the language of Zhao’s essay, of either embodied or disembodied knowledge, and are desperate to escape to the U.S. 

Although Taiwan is now a fairly prosperous democracy, its geopolitical situation, and hence its future, remain in many ways as precarious as ever.  The same holds true for Taiwanese “identity” (and for Hong Kong’s, as we have seen over the past few months).  Perhaps Zhao, who clearly identifies with Chen Yingzhen, is simply warning his students not to get their hopes up.  Like the Lord, geopolitics giveth, and geopolitics taketh away.      

​My thanks to Jeffrey Kinkley for information on Chen Yingzhen.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“The two knowledge paradigms, ‘embodiment’ and ‘disembodiment,’ while appearing to be antagonistic, actually work together to achieve the same goal, which is keep the knowledge ‘appropriately imported’ by Third World elites separate from their lived realities.   This has caused incalculable intellectual and spiritual harm to the Third World. From the perspective of the Third World outside the empire, the ‘dichotomy’ between ‘embodiment’ and ‘disembodiment’ is actually more like the ‘dichotomy’ between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in the United States—a distinction without a difference.  On the one hand, ‘disembodied knowledge,’ with its huge history and vast narrative, plays the foundational role of ‘modernization theory’ in the social sciences.  On the other hand, an extremely individualized and inner ‘modernism’ permeates literature and art, manifesting itself as a kind of inner ‘embodiment’ and the exhaustive pursuit of an individual ‘inner’ world.”
 
“The so-called ‘direct action’ of today's Hong Kong youth is not the directness of genuine self-expression, but is rather the performative action of  an ‘agent’ or an ‘actor.’  It is the performance of an imagined ‘collective unitary subject’ (‘the Hong Kong people’) that conveys performance instructions to plural individual bodies. When history appears as a ‘courageous’ body of direct action on the one hand, and a symbolic space that is de-localized, de-historicized, and fleshed out by racism on the other, and engages in a ‘politics of despair’ in order to bring these two poles together, we must sound the alarm of fascism.”
 
“The Chinese or East Asian humanistic tradition has never attached great importance to individual ‘rationality,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘equality,’ but rather to the ethical and synergistic relationship between heaven and earth, and between human beings, and how, in this worldly order, to pursue each person's self-reflection and cultivation, to put oneself in another’s place, beginning with self and family and extending outward in pursuit of fulfillment. The core of humanism here is the interconnectedness between heaven and earth and the distinction between the gentleman and the small man, which refers to the harmony between man and nature, the overcoming of moral nihilism, and the commitment to the ethical responsibilities of various communities, which is our “tradition.’”
 
Translation
 
Fake Embodied Knowledge:  The Contemporary Crisis of the Humanities and Youth in Hong Kong and Taiwan
 
Beginning roughly in the 1990s, the term "embodiment," or "embodied knowledge," has become popular in the humanities and social sciences in Taiwan, China.[2] Virtually everything that is talked about in Taiwan's mainstream academics comes from the West, and the same is true for "embodied knowledge."  In the late 1960s, the discussion, launched by Western feminism, of the relationship between public and private, knowledge and the body, profoundly criticized the previous rationality-driven pursuit of a structured narrative of "disembodied knowledge" through a powerful call to action summed up in the slogan "the personal is political." Following this wave, an elite posture has emerged in the contemporary humanities and social sciences, and all self-proclaimed "progressive," "critical," and even "left-wing" intellectuals warmly embrace "embodied knowledge."
 
Although I agree with the critique of "disembodied knowledge," I do not agree with the contemporary Western and Taiwanese academic conceptions of "embodied knowledge," and I believe that there is even a hidden symbiotic relationship between the two. This paper attempts to explain the intellectual and political consequences of "embodied knowledge" through an analysis of radical youth in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and seeks to propose some preliminary ideas for the construction of a genuine "embodied knowledge."

The Problem: The Uneasy Coexistence of Fragmented Paradigms among Hong Kong and Taiwanese Youth
 
First, it should be noted that the dichotomy between "embodied knowledge" and "disembodied knowledge" imagined and celebrated by "progressive" scholars does not actually describe and explain today's reality. We can see that the young participants in the violent riots in Hong Kong in the past two years and the Sunflower incident in Taiwan in 2014 on the one hand embraced certain cognitive and value elements of the paradigm of "embodiment," such as the emphasis on the here and now, the expression of current desires, street democracy, direct action, decentering, as well as a dogmatic aesthetic worship of the individual and of "smallness."  At the same time they displayed disdain for and denial of theoretical thinking, historical consciousness, investigation of empirical reality and even communication and consensus…All of these are examples extreme "embodiment." The "wearing of masks" is just a Dadaized manifestation of this "politics of embodiment.”
 
Yet at the same time, and in a way that sets up an absolute dichotomy between good and evil, they kneel in worship to highly abstract Western values (especially "democracy" and "freedom"), as if these are suprahistorical and supralocal eternal "truths." All of this is very "disembodied." The contradiction between the extreme embodiment in action and the extreme disembodiment in symbolic space (freedom, democracy, revolution) coexists despite their mutual opposition.
 
Why do these young people perceive the world and act in such a divided way?  To answer this question, we need to explore the contemporary intellectual situation of the highly Westernized mainstream humanities and social sciences communities in Hong Kong and Taiwan (e.g., the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and National Taiwan University).  These faculties are not only unable to offer alternative thinking or engage in sober dialogue with the youth of Hong Kong and Taiwan, but also play an exceptionally active role in supporting them. And behind the young people of Taiwan and Hong Kong and their professors is the weight of opinion of Western humanistic scholarship, Western politics, Western capital, and the entire Western mainstream mass media. From this we can posit that there is a deep intrinsic connection between the pathology of Western humanities and the youth of Taiwan and Hong Kong.
 
What has gone wrong with the Western academic system of humanities and social sciences? In a nutshell, since the establishment of the modern university system, humanities in the West have been developing and consolidating "disembodied knowledge." University disciplines are highly differentiated and specialized, forming their own professional discourses and dialogue communities. In terms of knowledge production, the modern university system makes little effort to "communicate" with the general population outside the academy on important issues of daily life, and actually tries to isolate itself in order to achieve a benchmark of modernity: social differentiation and intellectual objectivity. Many years ago, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998)  noted that "the failure of university discourse in the search for meaning, for values embodied in activity, for the reconfiguration of society, is not a recent phenomenon."

Truly effective humanistic thought and knowledge should encourage and promote the continuity that already exists between knowing and being/living, instead of attempting to sever it. But today's university system creates and perpetuates an artificial disconnect between the two through the operation of capital and the politics of knowledge. One of the obvious consequences of this rupture is the separation between the physical actions of Taiwan and Hong Kong’s radical youth and symbolic space they occupy; their bodies cannot find words for what they want to say, and their words cannot see their bodies.
 
The "Paradigm Dilemma" and the Intellectual and Spiritual Damage Inflicted on Third World
 
Only through a clear understanding of the fact that contemporary Western humanities and social sciences scholarship is based on the hegemony of "disembodiment " can we truly understand why contemporary Western humanities and social sciences scholarship emphasizes "embodiment" as a part of “political correctness.” In fact, "embodiment" can be seen as a kind of imperialistic "macro-regulation" in the field of academic thought: internally, it can alleviate the suffocation caused by the hegemony of "disembodied knowledge" in the humanities, even as it expresses, at the same time, various contemporary personal difficulties experienced on the campuses of Western universities and by urban middle-class elites. Externally, this politically correct "embodiment of knowledge" can also be exported to the Third World, becoming a "soft power" to challenge the local order.

For this reason, "embodied knowledge," often centered on minorities defined by race, gender, or sexual orientation, does not constitute a challenge to "disembodied knowledge," but rather functions as a control valve for the latter, maintaining the reproduction of the system of "disembodied knowledge." Within the empire, it plays the role of "self-deception." Outside the empire, it plays the role of "cheating others." Therefore, I call it "fake embodied knowledge."
 
The two knowledge paradigms, "embodiment" and "disembodiment," while appearing to be antagonistic, actually work together to achieve the same goal, which is keep the knowledge “appropriately imported”[3] by Third World elites separate from their lived realities.   This has caused incalculable intellectual and spiritual harm to the Third World. From the perspective of the Third World outside the empire, the "dichotomy" between "embodiment" and "disembodiment" is actually more like the "dichotomy" between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in the United States—a distinction without a difference. 

On the one hand, "disembodied knowledge," with its huge history and vast narrative, plays the foundational role of "modernization theory" in the social sciences.  On the other hand, an extremely individualized and inner "modernism" permeates literature and art, manifesting itself as a kind of inner "embodiment" and the exhaustive pursuit of an individual "inner" world. The distance between the ideology of modernization and modernist literature and art seems huge:  the experience of knowledge begins at the heights of the vast and abstract social sciences, and then passes through various layers of history, society, economics and culture, finally alighting on the literary and artistic feelings of alienated individuals. The two kinds of knowledge—one high and one low, one big and one small, one external and one internal—would appear at first to be opposed or unrelated, but what they in fact have in common is a deliberate detachment from historical and social reality, a commitment to hopeless emptiness, and a joint shoring up of imperial discourse—especially "freedom," the "individual," and the "democracy" constructed on their foundation—working together to serve imperial hegemony.

In retrospect, it was during the Cold War and with the backing of geopolitical hegemony that the U.S. introduced the Third World to theories of modernization in the social sciences, modernism in literature and art (e.g., abstract expressionism), and various schools of thought and scholarship that served U.S. interests in a high-profile fashion through the U.S. Information Service, U.S. embassies, and different foundations.
 
From this perspective, in the "nativist literature debate" in Taiwan in the late 1970s, the "nativist literature" school actually tried to break the shackles imposed on contemporary Taiwanese culture and thought by the hegemony of Western discourse, and its failure foreshadowed the subsequent unhappy fate of Taiwan's humanistic thought and social politics. The "paradigm dilemma" created a split between intellectuals and life, society, and national history. In the view of the left-wing Taiwanese writer and social critic Chen Yingzhen's (1937-2016), intellectuals caught in this dilemma could no longer be called "intellectuals" but were mere "readers" who simply perused the books that were popular in the West.

Chen’s 1967 story The Comedy of Narcissa Tang唐倩的喜剧 accurately captures the sense of impotence deeply felt by humanistic intellectuals at the time.[4] Through Chen Yingzhen's observations, we see a very finely wrought academic and political mechanism in which the reproduction of "disembodied knowledge" is achieved through academic circles linked to an "embodied knowledge" whose goal is self-justification and self-congratulation. Hegemony must grant academics working in the humanities a little freedom, a certain distant notion of self-importance, to sustain the whole operation of "disembodied knowledge.” In The Comedy of Narcissa Tang Qian, the protagonists indirectly address their own unspeakable pain by following certain schools of Western academic humanism…
 
Half a century[5] after the publication of The Comedy of Narcissa Tang, the radical youth of Taiwan and Hong Kong and their university professors still cannot find a language of knowledge or thought that directly confronts their own discomfort and pain and opens up to the world and history at large, but instead keep drowning their suffering with other people’s wine. As a result, the humanities in Taiwan and Hong Kong are full of  the "outer light 外光" and "evil voices 恶声" that come from the powerful West.  Since everyone simply follows along, the entire intellectual world, to cite Lu Xun, emits a ghostly atmosphere, having lost is inner light 内曜 and true voice 心声:  "its roots are exposed and its spirit at a crossroads.”
 
“Fake Embodiment" and the Specter of Fascism
 
The reason why young people in Taiwan and Hong Kong today cannot find the proper words and thoughts to express their anguish and pain is that the universities they attend and the teachers who teach them (including myself) do not, in principle, have this ability either. This is because when the modern Western university system was founded, the capacity for self-cultivation was excluded, and now although it claims to be making an effort, it continues to pay a social price for this early choice.  Those old-fashioned researchers who stick to their specialized disciplines and ignore worldly affairs are perhaps above such things, but many teachers of the humanities and social sciences in contemporary Taiwan and Hong Kong still congratulate one another for teaching a politically correct, self-justifying, finger-pointing, and degenerate "fake embodied knowledge."
 
Why are the physical consequence of this "fake embodied knowledge" not isolation and individualized remorse and passivity, but rather the violent and near-violent direct action that is on the rise today? To answer this question, we must first return to the "paradigm dilemma" in which "both ends are empty."  Because of the lack of social and historical intermediaries, "freedom" and "individuality" can only jump back and forth between the individual body and the abstract heavens, and thus can only be empty and formal. In general, these "two empty ends" lend support to the broad liberal order, respectively through the "modernization" of the social sciences and the "modernism" of humanistic aesthetics.
 
The claim seems to be that the external world has already evolved into the historically best liberal system, and the individual is merely responsible for discovering their own internal desires. However, this "paradigm dilemma" can at any time lend support to fascism, which is the modern variant of liberalism.  Historically, we see that "Taisho democracy" preceded the rise of fascism in Japan, just as "Weimar democracy" preceded the rise of fascism in Germany. Liberalism and fascism are inherently interchangeable, because when individualism is emptied of all historical and social content and context, a hollow "individual subject" is easily and quickly transformed into an equally hollow "collective subject."  In the hollowed out form of the "disembodied" liberal modernization narrative, the individual-based Enlightenment trappings of "freedom" and "democracy" can be quickly shed and replaced by another "body"—the "body of the civilized race," which becomes a hotbed of racism.
 
Similarly, the so-called "direct action" of today's Hong Kong youth is not the directness of genuine self-expression, but is rather the performative action of  an "agent" or an "actor.”  It is the performance of an imagined "collective unitary subject" ("the Hong Kong people") that conveys performance instructions to plural individual bodies. When history appears as a "courageous" body of direct action on the one hand, and a symbolic space that is de-localized, de-historicized, and fleshed out by racism on the other, and engages in a "politics of despair" in order to bring these two poles together, we must sound the alarm of fascism.
 
Toward True Embodied Knowledge
 
When the radical youth of Taiwan and Hong Kong shout "freedom," "democracy," "revolution," "restoration," and other emotionally laden symbols, or when they refer to China as “Shina 支那,”[6] [a term of opprobrium used by Japanese militarists before and during the Sino-Japanese War], intellectuals have the responsibility to decipher the distant historical origin behind such incantations and the hidden emotional ties buried within them of which the youth are unaware.  When we think about the crisis and possibilities of humanities and social sciences, a touchstone may be: how to prompt the young people of Taiwan and Hong Kong find a way of thinking and speaking that can express their feelings, produce inner light, and avoid falling into self-pitying despair.
 
This brings us to the central concern of this paper: how to build a genuine "embodied knowledge.” In the middle of the last century, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) proposed his concept of the "sociological imagination," a knowledge project whose aim was to break the bureaucratized knowledge system whose goal was to sustain the hegemonic system of the United States during the Cold War, and which was characterized primarily by "conceptual fetishism" and "methodological fetishism."  In contrast to the professional and indifferent "intellectual technicians" who prostrate themselves before these two kinds of fetishism, Mills called for the creation of a kind of "intellectual artisan" who is able to bring together the distress felt by real people in contemporary American society with the social structural conditions that shape this distress, thus bringing the "individual" and the "whole" together.

For Mills, perhaps the first scholar in the English-speaking world to use the concept of "postmodern" in an original way, "postmodern" meant that people experienced a great deal of uneasiness and distress, but had lost the ability to relate their own uneasiness and distress to their larger history, the larger structures that defined them. In this repressive, frustrating, and fragmented "postmodern" situation, Mills put forth the classical proposition of a "return of reason," with an eye toward re-establishing a reliable relationship between "reason" and "freedom" in order to resist the mind-body deviation and the rupture between mental and physical experience and intellectual exploration under the weight of the bureaucracy.
 
I once faithfully embraced such a "sociological imagination." But in the last decade or so I have moved away, out of a sense of unease, and even developed a critical perspective. My initial unease was not because Mills was so obviously "wrong," but because his "universalism" ignored my Third World sensibilities. Mills was facing a highly centralized and compartmentalized political and academic system in post-World War II America, in which the problems that people really felt in their daily lives were either ignored by the humanities and social sciences or deformed and cast into a realm where the real problems could not be confronted or articulated—what he called "big theory" and "fragmented empiricism.” This is surely a problem we face as well, but it is by no means the only problem we have, nor is it the most important one.

One of the constant anxieties throughout Chen Yingzhen's life was to make people understand that the alienation, sense of distance, loss of meaning, identity anxiety, and various psychiatric symptoms of human beings under modernity, which are the concerns of Western intellectual and cultural circles, should not immediately become our primary problems in the name of "universality," and that their distress should not automatically become our distress. For those of us in the non-Western world, the problems we have encountered as a result of our own historical context, such as the rupture of humanistic traditions, the confusion and self-denial of the national subject that emerged under the domination of imperialism and colonialism, are not at the core of the American agenda. Mills has his own American agenda, so where is our own agenda?
 
I once envisioned starting from the same point as Mills—the reconstruction of the connection between individual experience and the larger structure, the larger historical issues—and following his path.  Today, I don't even think that a common starting point necessarily exists. Perhaps the only common starting point that can be established is an abstract position with no specific content: we all need to overcome the separation of body and mind, of experience and intellect. Once we start from this position, the paths of thought and knowledge exploration are bound to take very different directions.
 
For Mills, the frustration with the articulation of the physical and mental anguish of the contemporary American public was due to the highly rationalized bureaucratic system of the "military-industrial complex," the "power elite," or the state apparatus, and the organization of huge capitalist corporations. Hence he called for a relatively clear-cut "gesture of resistance:"  a "social force,” led and educated by public intellectuals, against an evil that might well be represented by the "state” as a rhetorical representation of evil. Both the gesture and the language of resistance are clear. However, when we look at Mills' writing in detail, this tension between "society" and "state" does not slip into empty political rhetoric or emotionally overloaded symbols, because he remains loyal to historical and empirical data and methods.
 
But the slide from Mills' "sociological imagination" to today's emotional posture of "society versus state" is often just a step away. The "public intellectuals" who claim to be inspired by Mills or by "radical democracy" often display an arrogant moral posture and offer a simplistic analysis of reality. The "public intellectuals" and the "civil society" they represent are a logically necessary good because their antithesis, the "state," is a necessary evil. On the other hand, and perhaps more fundamentally, because of the presupposition that the outcome of resistance is "good," "public intellectuals" (as well as "society" or "civil society" or "disadvantaged groups") self-prophetically and automatically take their place as agents of that "good."

Such a political myth is clearly genealogically related to Christianity, especially Protestantism, and displays an intuitive (non-theoretical) tendency toward anarchist feelings and attitudes. Have not the youth of Hong Kong and Taiwan and their teachers, who use Western social theory as a guideline for progress, fallen into this three-sided "gesture-emotion-language" trap?  It is time to say goodbye to all of this.
 
In the Western humanist tradition, which is steeped in Christian monotheism, reason and freedom have always been seen as unique talents of man (and often of Christians only, in the blood-stained history of empires and colonies), talents granted by God, and Westerners (Christians) have therefore had a sense of their status as above all things and above other peoples. What Mills wanted to address was how to reclaim reason and freedom now that "God is dead".
 
We can no longer follow Mills in universalist posture akin to that of the "public intellectual," because the questions we face now can no longer be determined exclusively by the "social sciences" but must be discussed in the context of "our" humanities and history.  In the face of these problems, we cannot copy the intellectual and normative structures constructed by the West in their humanistic traditions, but must extract, from our own civilizational traditions and social structure, concepts, theories, and methods that are more relevant to our contemporary situation and problems.
 
The Chinese or East Asian humanistic tradition has never attached great importance to individual "rationality," "freedom," and "equality," but rather to the ethical and synergistic relationship between heaven and earth, and between human beings, and how, in this worldly order, to pursue each person's self-reflection and cultivation, to put oneself in another’s place, beginning with self and family and extending outward in pursuit of fulfillment. The core of humanism here is the interconnectedness between heaven and earth and the distinction between the gentleman and the small man, which refers to the harmony between man and nature, the overcoming of moral nihilism, and the commitment to the ethical responsibilities of various communities, which is our "tradition."

Our intellectual exploration needs to start from this foundation, not from a context that has been imposed on us by the West. To understand our era, Chinese scholars, including those in Hong Kong and Taiwan, must withdraw from Western social science discourse and enter our own cultural and historical context to fashion our own perspectives and sensitivities, discourses and concepts, values and commitments. To confront our own problems and to build our own intellectual project, we have to find the language and ways of feeling that are buried deep in our own historical civilization. In this way, the sense of uncertainty and dissonance that many people feel today is an opportunity to reconnect with our humanistic traditions and to re-establish our humanities and social sciences.
 
Therefore, how to reconceptualize China is not, and should not be, a matter of "free choice" for aimless individuals. We must look for the intellectual resources that can link the body with knowledge in an effective and vital way from within China's own humanistic and historical traditions and the inescapable restrictions of the Westernized Chinese language we use, and shape and modify them for our present needs. Only on this basis and premise can we start a dialogue with the excellent intellectual resources of the West, learn from the strengths of others, and repair our own shortcomings. The same is true for the West. Fei Xiaotong's idea that " If people appreciate their own beauty and that of others, and work together to create beauty in the world, the world will live in harmony" is perhaps a better vision of "internationalism."
 
As you can imagine, this is an extremely large intellectual project that may require the efforts of several generations and cannot be undertaken by any single individual. But in my humble opinion, the intellectual resources we can deploy include at least the "new tradition" of the 20th century Chinese revolution, which emphasized the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, and the "old tradition" of the ancient Chinese scholars who continually sought to encompass the world through cultivation, and to put themselves in the place of others. The "New Tradition" is not the same as the Western tradition.

"Tradition" is not a negative counterpart of the "present," as Western humanities and social sciences often explicitly or implicitly suggest, but a multitude of unbreakable "sources" that constitute the subject.  Such an imagination of the subject may be able to address such "modern" pathologies as empty individualism and its accompanying concept of freedom and equality, instrumental domination of rationalism, separation and fracture of the social sphere, and the internal and external contradictions and insincerity of the subject.
 
Therefore, the "reconstruction of the intellectual, moral and aesthetic subject" is the most important issue before us, and it is our intellectual responsibility. However, the West (Western scholarship) is not completely exempt from moral responsibility on this issue. Western scholars, no matter how sharply they criticize the West's own humanistic crisis, tend to not really understand that those problems, while harmful to themselves, are even more harmful to the Third World, and that such harm to others is in turn beneficial to themselves—to the maintenance of their imperial order. Thus, if Western scholars do not understand the humanistic crisis in the West in relation to imperialism and neocolonialism, their introspection may also be hypocritical, or at least incomplete. For if it were thorough, there would be a need for introspection and action beyond the nation-state or the West. To the Lyotard-style self-critics within the West, we might ask: What is the role of the Western intellectual system with respect to the events in Hong Kong today? Are you morally obliged to answer?
 
Conclusion 
 
The problem of youth in Hong Kong and Taiwan today is a problem of the state of knowledge, a problem of the subject of knowledge, a problem of colonialism and imperialism, and even a problem of the emergence of fascism in a broadly liberal world. A long-term intellectual project may be to build "embodied knowledge" that is in line with our tradition and reality and that can be linked step by step to political ideals in terms of mind, body, and heart, and in terms of family, country, and world. Therefore, the ultimate point of this article is not the youth of Hong Kong and Taiwan, the issue of Hong Kong and Taiwan, nor the geopolitical issue, but the knowledge of "what makes China China." This kind of knowledge should not only find the language of our own civilization to express personal pain and anxiety, but also start from our civilization to feel the pain and anxiety that we could not feel and express before, and on this basis rebuild the humanities and social sciences in contemporary China
 
Notes

[1] 赵刚, “这代年轻人, 为何容易被“做局”?一位台湾教授的反思,” published online in Beijing Cultural Review/文化纵横 on April 15, 2021.  For an interview with Zhao on a similar subject, click here.
 
[2] Translator’s note:  The author says “Taiwan, China” both for reasons of personal politics, and because his text is published in China.  It sounds as awkward in Chinese as it does in English.

[3] Translator’s note:  Zhao uses the term  nalai 拿来, which is shorthand for nalai zhuyi 拿来主义 which we might translate as “appropriatism.” The term was coined by the writer Lu Xun in 1934 in opposition to the “give-away-ism” (送去主义) which Lu thought characterized China’s dealings with the world, and especially Japan. 

[4] Translator’s note:  Set in the 1960s, the story recounts four love affairs of the book’s heroine, Tang Qian, with four different intellectuals embodying different mindsets and intellectual styles.  The author makes fun of his characters, and perhaps himself as well.

[5] Translator’s note:  Literally, “after half a 60 year cycle 半甲子之后,” but half a century makes more chronological sense.

[6] Translator’s note:  For more on the use of Shina by Hong Kong protesters, see here.