Highly Recommend “New Sayings from Peking University” — ★

Just finished reading a little over half of it. 

Of course it’s a quarterly recommendation! And more than that, a seriously urgent quarterly recommendation. 

Here’s a passage I just happened to read: 

Page 76: In 1998, Peking University held its centennial celebration. A TV reporter interviewed Chen Hansheng and asked him to say a few words wishing Peking University well. By then Chen was already a hundred years old; counting on his fingers, he said: “I have three things to say to Peking University’s teachers: first, take good care to help young students; second, don’t become officials; third, write more books.” The reporter insisted that he say something in祝福, a blessing, to Peking University. Chen said: “May Peking University in the future be run as well as Old Peking University was.” The reporter and his family were displeased, and coached him to say, “You should say that Peking University will only get better and better.” Chen repeated it three times, and each time it came out exactly as before; he refused to say what others had instructed him to say. 

I hope those people who are always droning on about “Peking University must strive to become a world-class university” and “Peking University still has quite a distance to go before it reaches world-class status” and the like will all read this book carefully, and think hard about what those two characters, “Peking University,” really mean. Do they mean “an academic backbone of around 800 people and a management backbone of around 200 people,” or “national key laboratories and national engineering centers”? Think more about how far North Big and Old Peking University are apart? — Use all the imagination you can muster to imagine just how great, how glorious, how towering and awe-inspiring a university in China could possibly be… How excellent could it possibly become? As strong as Harvard? As formidable as Oxford and Cambridge? — Could those world-class universities, in the role they played in an entire nation and an entire era, possibly be any more legendary than Peking University? World-class, world-class, endlessly repeating the phrase: if Peking University really became “world-class,” then Old Peking University would truly be dead! But now, as a Peking University student, I can tell you very responsibly: Peking University is still here, and the legend will continue to be written. Although Peking University is now facing an environment more dangerous than the May Fourth period, the Kuomintang period, or the Cultural Revolution period (because this environment no longer feels dangerous, it is therefore the most dangerous of all), Peking University will surely make it through! Bless Peking University: “May Peking University in the future be run as well as Old Peking University was!”

Latest comments

• Yi Wu

  2007-03-21 20:34:42

  Although Peking University is now facing an environment more dangerous than the May Fourth period, the Kuomintang period, or the Cultural Revolution period (because this environment no longer feels dangerous, it is therefore the most dangerous of all)
  ————The frog-in-warm-water experiment… in the end it slowly becomes boiling water…

• Gu Ba

  2007-03-21 21:44:00

  I’ve always liked using the warm-water frog metaphor.
  Everyone is saying that this is already no longer an age that produces “masters,” that there is no longer any environment in which masters can emerge. In a certain sense, that makes sense (because of factors such as specialization), but in fact, who says there are no masters? Who says masters no longer emerge? I’ve observed the Philosophy Department at Peking University for more than two years, and everywhere I look I see masters!

  Where does the problem lie? It’s not that masters have disappeared, but that masters are no longer given attention, no longer recognized by people. People either only praise the old masters of a few generations ago, or else look only to foreign countries; most people simply pay no attention to the academic world at all. Masters are still there. Even if they are not as earthshaking as those of earlier generations, unusual and extraordinary figures are everywhere. Although the scholars at Peking University are, to be sure, seldom the sort that makes one gaze up in awe, those whose character and bearing inspire heartfelt conviction are still everywhere. The problem is that people have lost their appreciation for, and attention to, people who are noble, lofty, or strange and mad. Even in an era like the Cultural Revolution, people still paid attention to masters: look at who was denounced as a “reactionary academic warlord,” and that was a top-tier master; the next rank down could only be called a “reactionary academic authority”; ordinary scholars could only be called “counterrevolutionary revisionists.” Back then people were also especially “attentive” to masters. But now, while people lament that there are no masters, at the same time they have no interest whatsoever in whether there are any masters or not. They feel that scholarship does not need masters, only experts, only papers; so of course all the masters have gone into concealment and no longer appear.

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