I shelved this for a full year without continuing it. Several times I almost forgot about this unfinished thing; several times I meant to resume it but gave up halfway. Probably by then the mood that had made me want to review my own growth had already vanished… Still, let me at least finish the high school stage.
Huadong Normal University Second High School was originally in Putuo District, next to Huadong Normal University, and rather run-down. By the time I was in the second semester of my sophomore year, it had moved to Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park in Pudong, and the new campus was indeed beautiful.
Although both campuses were in “remote areas,” I somehow never boarded at school. In my first year I rented a place next to the school; later, because my family bought an apartment near the Dongfang Road subway station in Pudong, taking the subway to Zhangjiang was quite convenient, so I still didn’t board. Among the twenty-four students in the all-science class, I was the only day student.
Being a day student naturally had some effect on my relations with my classmates. Among my high school classmates, I really didn’t have any especially close “brothers,” but the impact wasn’t that great. The biggest problem with being a day student was that it kept me from being directly immersed in the study atmosphere of the other students, and I wasn’t diligent enough in competitions.
My competitive record in high school was a complete failure; there was nothing worth mentioning. I focused on math competitions. But in my senior year math competition I got second place among the first-prize winners: I only missed two small problems on the first paper, which should have been quite good, and I had hopes of making winter camp; but the second paper was utterly disastrous. The first plane-geometry problem was originally very simple, but I actually solved it analytically. The second problem was astonishingly a number theory problem. I had long believed that number theory would not be tested in competitions (at least not in the major problems), so I hadn’t studied it seriously. Still, this problem was quite easy; unfortunately, I still wrote it wrong, and only half a day after leaving the exam room did I realize what the issue was. As for the third problem, basically no normal person could solve it, and of course I didn’t solve it either…
It was said that some people solved that geometry problem analytically too, but they were all just bluffing, so the grading group ruled that any analytic method counted as wrong. My analytical solution was in fact correct; it was only that I skipped a cumbersome simplification step, which could have been worked out with a little more scratch paper, but at first it was marked wrong. After I first learned the “intelligence report” on my score, I tried to appeal. At first I went to our math teacher, but there was no response for a long time. In the end, my parents went directly to the math school to find someone, and they added points to my score (otherwise I would have had only a third prize).
But in any case, the competitions were unsuccessful, and my regular grades were even worse. In the all-science class, the scores for Chinese, math, foreign language, physics, chemistry, biology, and politics in the first year, second year, and first semester of the third year were recorded with certain weights, and then a composite ranking was produced to serve as a reference for university admissions. My problem was that I was average or slightly above in most subjects, while English was always dead last: most of the time I was number one from the bottom, and occasionally second or third from the bottom. The issue was that all the scores were calculated as standard scores, with 300 for first place and 100 for last place, distributed in between according to a normal distribution. So if in one subject all your exams have you at the very bottom for a long time, that is really quite a bad thing. My eventual composite ranking falling to second from the bottom was therefore no surprise at all.
Being second from the bottom in the all-science class wasn’t all that shameful. The all-science class was a place where talented people gathered; compared with that, the “pressure of the first-tier university crowd” at Peking University seemed less severe. The twenty-odd students in the all-science class all had recommendation eligibility from the very beginning—in theory, we could be recommended to seven schools: Peking University, Tsinghua, Fudan, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, USTC, Huadong Normal University, and Beijing Normal University—but in practice the first four schools would take us all.
In the early days, it seemed one could choose any school one liked for the all-science class, but perhaps the quality had declined somewhat? In recent years, the whole class could no longer all be recommended to Tsinghua and Peking University. Generally speaking, several of the top ten went to Peking University, the bulk of the middle went to Tsinghua, and the last three or five went to Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Our year was still like that, and I was the only one who broke the pattern.
The last student in the all-science class could still choose any major at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. On the one hand, this was because the Second High School had a relatively good relationship with Jiao Tong University—the Second High School had good relations with Jiao Tong and Tsinghua, and poorer relations with Fudan and Peking University, with this tendency showing itself so clearly as to be annoying… On the other hand, all-science students were after all capable people. Call it “receiving” our students, call it “picking up the leftovers,” our classmates who went to Jiao Tong have always performed quite outstandingly. My performance at Peking University would not disgrace the all-science class either—though the all-science class no longer even exists…
It looked as though even second from the bottom like me was only fit for Jiao Tong. When the Peking University and Tsinghua admissions teams came to our school—for students from the major competitive schools in Shanghai, Peking University and Tsinghua would send people directly to the schools to recruit recommended students; if things were settled on the spot, you would be admitted right there, and we didn’t need to go to Peking University for any recommended-student exam or anything like that.—of course we tried our hardest to get in. But at that time the few of us were all rejected, and later repeated efforts still came to nothing. It went on until everyone believed that the four of us at the bottom of the ranking would be recommended to the Jiao Tong joint program; it went on until the deadline for Peking University’s recommendation application was about to arrive, and on the very day the materials for recommendation to Jiao Tong were about to be mailed out, I suddenly asked that the materials be held back; just as the principal was about to leave on a business trip, we found her to sign the papers, and it turned out I could be admitted to Peking University after all! This was truly a very dramatic scene.
Here I want to thank Liu Mingli, then deputy director of Peking University’s admissions office; without his help, the miracle would have been impossible.
Long before Peking University and Tsinghua sent people to Shanghai to recruit students, I had taken it upon myself to send emails to the admissions addresses of Peking University and Tsinghua. Because by then the all-science class was clearly in its final days, and I couldn’t be sure that Peking University and Tsinghua would still care about our cohort the way they had in previous years. So I wrote to their mailboxes, promoting our class, and of course promoting myself as well, hoping that they would not miss this batch of talent. Out of selfish motives, the ideal situation would of course have been for Peking University and Tsinghua to recruit our entire class away; then even I, at the bottom of the ranking, would have had a shot.
Tsinghua didn’t really reply with anything, but Peking University’s admissions office wrote back to me, roughly saying that Teacher Liu Mingli looked forward to us and so on. Not long afterward, the admissions teachers from Peking University and Tsinghua arrived in Shanghai.
The person from Peking University who interviewed me was the older Teacher Lin. I believe I did not leave him with a particularly good impression in the interview. He asked me what department I would be willing to go to, and I replied: “I like mathematics and physics, but I know my scores make it unlikely that I could get into the math school or physics school, so as long as it’s a department even remotely related to math or physics, I’m willing to go.” Teacher Lin mentioned the philosophy department to me; I reluctantly said that would do too, though I hoped it would be considered last. Teacher Lin then brought up archaeology, and I said that for science students, archaeology mainly required chemistry, which was too far from math and physics… I said something like geophysics would also be fine. Teacher Lin told me to prepare for the possibility of not getting in through recommendation.
I also went to Tsinghua’s interview room, but I didn’t have very high expectations, because I originally didn’t have a strong desire to go to Tsinghua, and Tsinghua basically didn’t have any obscure departments. Moreover, during the preparation period for the interviews, after learning more about Peking University and Tsinghua, I had already genuinely been attracted by Peking University’s temperament.
In the end, Peking University and Tsinghua made a round through Shanghai’s major famous schools and recruited many top students. The Shanghai science class at the Second High School also benefited from the all-science class’s good fortune and had quite a few students directly admitted. One day those selected classmates received notice to go to a certain hall to meet the director of Peking University’s admissions office and Principal Xu (they had come in person to Shanghai). The few of us who had “failed” also mixed in with the last glimmer of hope and went along to participate, expressing our strong desire in person to the admissions director. I again emphasized my wish to enter the “geophysics department”… But in the end, miracles did not happen; those who failed remained failed. Still, some of the failed students, including the few of us, were somehow photographed warmly together with Principal Xu, as a keepsake…
During this period, I kept corresponding with Teacher Lin and Teacher Liu—especially Teacher Liu—who never let me completely lose hope. After the admissions director and Principal Xu left, my parents and teachers gradually gave up hope that I would still get into Peking University, but I was still in touch with Teacher Liu by email. I sent him articles I had written in high school—including excerpts from “The Great Unification of Philosophy” and a paper on the emergence of Chinese capitalism (which I’ll explain in more detail later). My original purpose in sending these articles was simply to show that, as a pure science student, my interests were by no means monotonous. But as my hope of getting into a science department grew increasingly dim—even the geophysics department was out of reach! (I was just short of becoming Teacher Wu’s junior fellow student) Below geophysics, the only even more obscure option was probably archaeology. Right, and philosophy too—this had always been treated by me as an extracurricular activity proving the breadth of my interests. Yet when I seriously began to consider this option, I gradually realized that it was in fact a far more ideal destination than geophysics! I explained to Teacher Liu and the others that my earlier reluctance about the philosophy department in the interview was only because I had never seriously considered such an option, and once I began to think about it and learn more information, my wish changed. Teacher Liu also pointed out that the logic track in the philosophy department required very strong mathematical ability, and it seemed things were taking a turn!
The philosophy department—that was the only one I had my eye on! Finally, just as Peking University’s recommendation admissions work was about to end, Teacher Liu gave me a definite reply. By then the school had already filled out the materials recommending us to Jiao Tong, and was just waiting to seal and mail them the next day. At this final moment I switched out the materials and sent the new materials to Peking University—everything went smoothly, and everyone was delighted!
Call it destiny, call it fate, in any case, I was truly unbelievably lucky—if my luck had been just a little worse, I would probably now be studying economics at Jiao Tong; if my luck had been just a little better, I would probably have gotten into the geophysics department, and I don’t know whether I would have switched to philosophy like Teacher Wu. In any case, the fact is that I believe the philosophy department was the best choice suited to me.
By the way, the reason I now serve as a moderator in the Future Peking University Community is to a large extent because of my own experience—when they don’t understand the philosophy department, just as I did back then, many classmates who might actually thrive in the philosophy department may never even have thought of it as an option, or may have had reservations about the philosophy department, thereby missing the chance to enter it.
So, what exactly was the “The Great Unification of Philosophy” I mentioned earlier—the few articles that prompted me to enter the philosophy department? I should probably start from the beginning again:
High school was the time when the scope of my interests suddenly expanded dramatically. Before junior high school, I only knew how to do mathematics. When I graduated from junior high, apart from mathematics, I couldn’t even imagine what else I might do in the future. But at the time I was graduating from junior high, I began to encounter popular science books in the First Push series—the earliest was that in the third year of junior high I first read the electronic version of A Brief History of Time on the internet. (Note: this article was left unfinished here half a year ago for some reason.) A Brief History of Time seems to have had little effect on me, and it wasn’t until my first year of high school, when I read Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps and Gribbin’s In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, that my interest was truly aroused. But one passage at the end of A Brief History of Time left a deep impression on me: “Philosophers have narrowed the scope of their inquiries so much that even Wittgenstein—the most famous philosopher of this century—says: ‘The only task left for philosophy is the analysis of language.’ What a fall from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!” At that time, I had never even heard of the most famous philosopher of this century, and I only found the names of Aristotle and Kant vaguely familiar. But this passage made me begin to notice the question of philosophy’s contemporary situation, and also aroused my interest in contemporary Western philosophers. I remember that the second essay I wrote in high school was about “the decline of philosophy,” and it was precisely this article that triggered the subsequent series of discussions about philosophy.
In my first year of high school, I read more popular science books on modern physics; at the same time, the politics class in my first year began teaching so-called “philosophy”; and in addition, the Chinese teacher, besides assigning the weekly essay as usual, also specially assigned a large research project for the research-oriented course, requiring us to choose a topic in the social sciences or humanities and write a decent paper (the word count requirement seems to have been over 3,000, with formatting requirements such as references, and it had to involve communication with the teacher and classmates plus repeated revisions, and finally a defense and discussion). These three things, taken together, became the turning point in my student life.
In Shanghai, politics class in the first year taught “philosophy.” Our politics teacher was a “grandma,” also our grade-level coordinator. Like my politics teacher in junior high school, she was a very good person, but in terms of learning and knowledge, she was of course rather ordinary. I remember that when a classmate asked a question like “what do left and right wing mean,” she couldn’t answer it, and she also didn’t go back and check later. In my second or third essay to the Chinese teacher, I mentioned my regret about the politics class teaching and also my disappointment with the politics teacher. The Chinese teacher showed my essay to the politics teacher, and we also exchanged ideas in the essay notebook. That was the beginning.
Immediately afterward, what I further discussed in my essay was the concept of “metaphysics” mentioned in politics class. Because I had seen this term in popular science books including Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps, and of course it was also mentioned many times in the politics textbook, I asked the politics teacher for the exact definition of the term. The answer I got was: metaphysics means “isolated, static, one-sided,” as opposed to dialectics, which is universally connected, moving and developing, systematic and comprehensive.
But my question was what “metaphysics” actually was, not what its specific features were. If metaphysics means an isolated, static, one-sided worldview and methodology, then why have so many philosophers devoted themselves to it? (Back then I only thought “isolated,” “static,” and “one-sided” were pejorative terms; now I know they are not necessarily so. In fact, the worldview and methodology that made modern science successful were precisely isolated, static, and one-sided.) I always felt that isolated, static, and one-sided described metaphysics’ characteristics rather than its original definition; otherwise, saying “metaphysics is isolated, static, and one-sided” would be equivalent to saying “metaphysics is metaphysics.” Moreover, understanding the term I had seen in popular science books according to this definition was obviously completely baffling.
My thought was: first, metaphysics must have some original meaning; second, those famous philosophers of idealist metaphysics, however hopeless they may have been, probably would not have been more stupid than I or an ordinary politics teacher, but I truly could not imagine that a discipline described in textbooks as so stupid could attract such intelligent minds to devote themselves to it. Therefore, I felt that something must have gone wrong somewhere!
Just then, the Chinese teacher assigned a project that would run through the whole first year of high school: to complete a humanities/social-science research topic. This was also part of the Second High School’s “research-based teaching”—I remember that when I first met ZW at Peking University, after learning that I came from the Second High School, the first thing he said was that our research-based teaching was terrible. Of course I was very displeased, because this kind of teaching was actually fantastic—it enabled me to adapt to university papers with no effort. In fact, I believe that many of our classmates wrote papers or research reports in the first year of high school whose quality was by no means inferior to the papers of many university students. We really spent several months on our papers earnestly, with teachers genuinely providing suggestions and guidance at every moment, and went through reading aloud, discussion, defense, and revision… To this day, I still have not seen a single university paper that can compare with the completeness and fullness of that whole process and of the effort I invested then. We were able to experience in high school such a complete “academic training” that one would not even get in university; the gains from that cannot be overstated.
Back to the point: I chose philosophy as the basic scope of my research topic, and then, beginning with verifying the original meaning of “metaphysics,” I read some philosophy books including 20th Century New Marxism. Of course, at that time I still hadn’t found suitable philosophy books (Shanghai Book City was a terribly bad bookstore), so more often I was inspired by popular science books and searched for articles on the internet to read. Naturally, at that time I was more like a folk philosopher, thinking things through on my own. My ambition and arrogance were laid bare in my topic’s original title—“The Great Unification of Philosophy” (the name comes from the “grand unification theory” in physics)!
My idea at the time was that philosophy consists of many different and opposed positions and ideas, but all fields and all positions ultimately converge by different routes to the same destination. Different worldviews are like different lenses (from microscopes to telescopes): through them we will see completely different worlds, but they are ultimately still one world.
In the paper, I tried to unify dialectics and metaphysics, unify materialism and idealism, unify science and philosophy… In the end, I proposed that the great unification of philosophy is a utopia, an ideal for which we strive but which can never be realized. If a true great unification were realized, it would mean the end of philosophy, but philosophy should not come to an end. Philosophy develops through continuously arising forks in the road and continually ongoing unifications.
If I were to write it again now, I’m afraid I would no longer be as superficial and arrogant as I was then. But the tendency toward “grand unification” still remains in my interests; what I am currently investing in is the integration of science and the humanities.
This paper received praise and encouragement from the Chinese teacher. Although in “The Great Unification of Philosophy” I also said that 100 perfectly apt compliments are not worth 100 criticisms: 99 of them are inappropriate abuse, and one hits the nail on the head. However, it must be admitted that praise and encouragement have had a greater impact on my growth. Of course, praise from someone I cannot agree with often annoys me even more, and I often take such praise as a revelation of my shortcomings; but praise from someone I do agree with will greatly encourage me—although criticism from them will also move me.
Another important event in high school was that I began to become obsessed with buying books. Although I had often bought comic books as a child, I still wasn’t very interested in browsing bookstores until high school. Shanghai Book City was the bookstore I visited most often, but although it was large, it wasn’t particularly appealing. What truly made me addicted to buying books was, in the end, the credit of Dangdang online bookstore.
It started in my second year of high school, when I searched Dangdang for a hard-to-find math competition book, and that was when I first tried online shopping. It turned out that buying books online was extremely convenient: just click the mouse a few times, then wait for the books to be delivered to your door and pay on delivery. I’m a lazy person, and I originally didn’t much like wandering around bookstores, so I actually preferred buying books online.
Then Dangdang gradually began its long price war with Zhuoyue Wang. In addition to driving the actual price of books down to extremely low levels—at the lowest point, the whole store was capped at 30 percent off!—it also launched rebate-coupon promotions and the like. So-called rebate coupons work much like the tricks of many department stores: for instance, spend 100 yuan in one purchase and you are given a 30-yuan voucher; that 30-yuan voucher can then be used the next time you shop, provided the total exceeds 100 yuan, thereby knocking 30 yuan off the bill. When the price war reached its peak, even the rebate vouchers had no minimum-spend requirement. But in any case, this was surely as natural a promotional tactic as any.
However, not long after the rebate-coupon promotions began, I realized there was a loophole to exploit!
Most of the books I bought were obscure titles, and they were often out of stock. The general rule at Dangdang and at ordinary online bookstores was this: if, say, an order contained three books and one of them was out of stock, the out-of-stock book would automatically be deleted and the remaining in-stock books would be delivered.
But suppose one of my 100-yuan orders used a “spend 100, get 30 off” voucher, and then books worth 10 yuan turned out to be out of stock. What then? The order total would fall below 100 yuan. If the voucher could no longer be used, the situation would become: I was originally supposed to spend 70 yuan to buy five books, but now, because of the store’s stock shortage, I would have to spend 90 yuan to buy four books? That simply makes no sense, does it? At that time Zhuoyue Wang was indeed this unfeeling, but Dangdang was more straightforward still—the use of the voucher was based on the order initially submitted, and if items were out of stock, the voucher remained valid all the same!
Unfortunately, it is said that because of the huge turnover of goods (in fact, because of a system flaw), items that were actually out of stock on Dangdang’s website could often still be ordered and purchased! So once I learned that a certain book was out of stock, and was sure that such an obscure book would not be replenished easily… for example, I could arrange for exactly 70 yuan of books in a 100-yuan order to go out of stock, while the remaining 30 yuan would be knocked off by a voucher, and because the rebate-coupon campaign was still ongoing, this free order of mine would then be eligible for a new rebate coupon… and so on…
Later, whether they noticed the loophole or simply because there were too many complaints about stock shortages, Dangdang seems to have improved the speed of its data updates, and it became difficult to buy the same out-of-stock book continuously over several days. But Dangdang still had another loophole—namely, the shopping-cart information was stored on the personal computer and was not updated in real time. In other words, if yesterday I added a book to my shopping cart at the discounted promotional price of 20 yuan (without placing the order), and today, when I continued shopping, found that the shelf price had been raised back to 25 yuan, I did not need to worry, because the price in the shopping cart would still be 20 yuan.
I am not a computer expert, so I do not know whether it would have been possible to tamper with the shopping-cart information saved somewhere on the computer. But I discovered that the shopping-cart information corresponded to Windows user accounts. For example, if this computer had several user accounts, then users logged in from different accounts would each have their own shopping-cart information. So my method was to create many Windows users, and place dozens of books into each user’s Dangdang shopping cart—books that were still available for purchase, but might go out of stock after a period of time. Then, after some time had passed, I would check those lists again. By then, some books could no longer be added to the shopping cart—the system would prompt that they were out of stock. Then I would delete the other books from the original shopping cart, leave only these out-of-stock books, and modify the quantity to be purchased (this operation was possible), and then add some in-stock books that I actually wanted to buy, using the voucher as before…
Although I was undoubtedly quite wicked, I still had a bit of conscience after all. First, sometimes books that were certain to be out of stock would still be delivered—and once, several at a time—and I never refused any order on receipt (in fact, Dangdang allowed unconditional refusal); second, I kept my spending within a moderate range, and the total amount of my historical orders was only about twenty thousand yuan, of which at least several thousand yuan had in fact been money I really paid out; third, I advertised Dangdang to the people around me and to netizens, but I never disclosed my tricks (this is the first time I have made them public online). But after all, paper cannot wrap up fire forever. At least half a year after I discovered this loophole, there were reportedly some booksellers who bought in bulk by exploiting such loopholes. If one really wanted to profit from this, one did not necessarily need to discover the later loophole involving the shopping cart; one could simply buy a certain book in bulk oneself and deliberately buy out the stock, thereby causing an out-of-stock situation. It was said that Dangdang suffered huge losses because of this. Added to that, the long price war with Zhuoyue Wang did not, as its grandiose claims had proclaimed, completely kill Zhuoyue Wang off (this bullying competition strategy irritated me, and Dangdang’s repeated reneging on its policies toward old members made me even angrier, so my sense of guilt over what I had done was slightly diminished~~), but instead led to Amazon’s acquisition of Zhuoyue. From some point on, Dangdang (in fact, it even did it once again when I was a freshman) no longer ran rebate-coupon promotions… But in fact, if its information system were improved, these loopholes could have been completely eliminated, just as such tricks could not be pulled on Zhuoyue and other websites. By the way, not long ago I used up many of the 100 vouchers from Wanlan Wang—each worth 5 yuan off for every 50 yuan spent—by the old method. But because I rather appreciate Wanlan, I only went as far as was necessary. If Wanlan Wang ever launches a rebate-coupon promotion with a larger denomination in the future, I will probably write to remind them of the possible danger~)
As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, my speculative book-buying on Dangdang made me fall in love with buying books. Later, my honest online book-buying consumption mainly shifted to Zhuoyue and Wanlan. In the end, once I got to Beijing and came into contact with bookstores that were by no means the same concept as Shanghai Book City, the momentum of my mad book-buying never stopped again.
There were many other large and small things in high school worth recording as well—for example, military training, laboring in the countryside, serving as a Youth League branch secretary, joining the Party, and so on—but the decisive matters were the ones above. I’m too lazy to write more today; I’ll add to it later when I feel like it.
August 2, 2007
At Fushan Road, Shanghai
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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