On “Gongqingyuan”

《共青苑》 is putting out a special issue for its 20th anniversary, and this piece is specially written for it.

When I was a freshman, Brother Wang Xin was the editor-in-chief of issue 39 of 《共青苑》, and I took part in doing some of the layout. When the handoff came to issue 40, it seemed that no suitable successor could be found for the moment, so I volunteered to become editor-in-chief.

Apart from having some interest in layout work — now that I think about it, I already had a bit of a tech-nerd bent back then — I was also very happy to edit a magazine like this. Of course, that was because after participating for a year, I already had a certain understanding of what 《共青苑》 was; otherwise, the magazine’s name and its affiliation with the Youth League would very likely have made me mistake it for some kind of propaganda pamphlet and keep my distance.

Indeed, later during orientation, when the freshmen were choosing departments to apply for in the student union or the Youth League committee, my 《共青苑》 group was completely snubbed. So much so that after the application forms were collected, an upperclassman saw that something was wrong, gave another round of introductions and a bit of persuasion, sent them back to be filled out again, and only then did my department manage to recruit a few members.

Of course, in fact 《共青苑》 did not need too many members. Besides the editor-in-chief, the main job of ordinary members was usually to sort out transcripts of lecture recordings, if there were any, and proofread the text. Still, I believed that 《共青苑》 needed a relatively independent organizational setup, just as any magazine office or information-sharing platform not intended for propaganda should keep as independent as possible.

The editorial office of 《共青苑》 is a miniature magazine house — that is my understanding of 《共青苑》. Although the earliest 《共青苑》 does seem to have been a propaganda pamphlet reporting on Youth League Day activities, under the inheritance of generations of predecessors in the philosophy department, it somehow came to resemble a comprehensive journal. From the development history of 《共青苑》, one can see that it was not a task assigned by higher-ups, but something spontaneously driven forward by each generation of editors and students; each generation of editor-in-chief tried to add a color of its own to the magazine.

For example, my predecessor redefined “共青” as “common youth,” whereas I introduced my “freedom of nothingness” — no theme, not even any issue titles. Rather than painstakingly searching for words like “A Sky of Essays” or “A Garden of Philosophical Reflection,” the classification method I used — “Part One, Part Two …” — could also be said to have a certain style of its own. It is not that there is no classification at all: without classification, things become scattered and lose their place; but neither is there any deliberate effort to paste on fixed labels.

I provide a stage, but do not preset too many rules, so that the students’ writing may perform here freely. This is my “positioning” for issue 40 of 《共青苑》, and also my understanding of the significance of 《共青苑》 for the philosophy department. Finally, I will quote what I said back then in the preface to issue 40 of 《共青苑》:

 The genre of 《共青苑》 has never had a fixed position. At times it is like an academic special issue, at times like a literary magazine, at times again like an old news review that records the passage of time, and occasionally it even turns itself into a themed anthology…… More often than not, though, it resembles none of these: to be precise, 《共青苑》 is simply a “stage” belonging to us alone, a free space for us to perform our own splendid youth in it!

 

《共青苑》 merely faithfully records the people, events, moods, and youth that belong only to us in the philosophy department. Generation after generation of editors has shed blood, sweat, and tears here, and generation after generation of students has left behind a word or two here — not in pursuit of fame, profit, or achievement, and not even in order to become archival historical material, but only in the hope that, at some moment, it may awaken a trace of nostalgic feeling.

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