He Qinglian: “We Are Still Looking Up at the Starry Sky”

He Qinglian: “We Are Still Gazing Up at the Starry Sky,” Lijiang Publishing House, January 2001 edition, third printing in February 2001, print run: 20001–40000

I came across this book quite by chance at Boya Hall. Because it was on the economics shelf, and since entering university I have hardly read many books on economics anymore. Yet in my senior year of high school, books in this area were ones I was quite immersed in—eighth grade I read science (the first was A Brief History of Time), tenth grade philosophy (the first was Twentieth-Century Western New Marxism), eleventh grade history (Stavrianos’s A Global History and Huang Rennyu’s The Great Chinese History), and in twelfth grade I was preparing to plunge into economics (He Xin’s books, Principles of Economics, and some translated works on economics whose names I have already forgotten, and so on). And because later I somehow and for no good reason ended up in the Philosophy Department at Peking University (I almost went to Jiaotong University’s school of management and economics), I went back to looking for philosophy books to read; now I have gone one step further back to the state of eighth and tenth grade: reading popular science books.

I had almost forgotten my passion for economics. Back then I not only was willing to do business myself, but even leaned toward becoming an economist—an economist who could point out the way for the world! This was not a notion that came only from reading economics books in twelfth grade; I already had this thought in tenth grade. So my plan in tenth grade was: first read philosophy to cultivate my powers of thought and understanding; then read history, because I felt that no matter what kind of scholarship one pursues (including literature, history, philosophy, and the social sciences, as well as the natural sciences), one must read history and must not become a person without roots or sources! I really did read philosophy and history with these ideas in mind at the time.

And now? Through a strange concatenation of circumstances, I have actually ended up in the Philosophy Department. Of course I now prefer to do philosophy, so I am afraid I will have no fate with economics in this life, and my ardor for economics has also faded a great deal. Yet recently, first I was shown an economics paper by a high school & middle school & primary school classmate of mine, asking me to offer some comments; a few days later I came upon this book—a collection of essays by an economist—and it caused the hot blood in my heart to surge up again (of course, only a little surge; it is also not very likely that I would go off to study economics again).

What attracted me to this book, of course, was its title. Those who know me can imagine that just this title alone was already sufficient reason for me to buy it. And indeed I basically did not even flip through it; I picked up the book and checked out. The next day, when I had some free time, I browsed through it—the mood of this book is indeed just as the title suggests, and it did not disappoint me. I randomly selected a few articles to read, and found myself waving my hands and feet in delight, shouting that it was immensely satisfying! In the end I could only offer one comment aloud: “How wonderful it would be if China had a few more economists with such a spirit!” It is a pity that although He Qinglian is certainly a celebrity, and although her The Pitfalls of Modernization was a rare academic bestseller, a figure like this is an oddity of the age…

December 14, 2005

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.