A few months ago Nagoya produced a mayor who, in the name of pursuing the truth, denied the Nanjing Massacre; Chinese people, unwilling to be outdone, produced Secretary Lin, who cast doubt on the Great Famine of Three Years.
These two events are to some extent comparable, and the line of questioning 
is similar too: such huge numbers—how could that be? I’ve never heard of it… no one witnessed it…
Yet compared with the injury done to public feeling, Secretary Lin’s case may be even more potent. After all, the Three-Year Disaster came just one generation after the Nanjing Massacre; many elderly people who personally experienced the Three-Year Disaster are still alive, and its geographic reach was also much broader than Nanjing’s. More crucially, the one denying the Great Famine is a Chinese person, not the Chinese people’s old enemy, the Japanese. When the Japanese spout a few crazy words, at most we curse them once: Here we go again! After so many years we stopped finding it strange long ago. But when a Chinese person says these crazy things, it already amounts to a kind of performance art of betraying one’s ancestry.
Of course, the reason these “questions” keep being raised is bound up with the fact that the historical grievances involved have never been fully settled; that great leader gave up settling accounts with Japan, and later history textbooks likewise gave up fully settling accounts with that great leader. If history is not faced squarely, then history will forever become a burden on future generations. We know that active forgetting is impossible unless one turns oneself into a nervous wreck or a madman. History as collective memory is the same: only by facing history squarely is it possible to transcend it.
But what does it mean to face history squarely? Does it mean that by adopting a scientific, critical attitude and continually questioning, one is facing history squarely? This still resembles the attitude one takes toward one’s personal history—endlessly doubting one’s own memory is not a kind of facing squarely. Excessive doubt, like deliberate forgetting, is a denial of the self, an evasion of history.
Is history beyond doubt? Of course not. But doubting history is not merely a purely rational matter.
It is obvious that Secretary Lin’s doubt was not motivated solely by scientific inquiry; his motive was to defend Mao, and this feeling of support was the background against which he raised his questions. My pointing out this background is not meant to attack him. On the contrary, the existence of such emotion actually provides a certain legitimacy to Secretary Lin’s act of questioning—of course, only with respect to his raising the question, not with respect to the question he raised. For example, only when I suffer neglect or abuse from my parents would I be able to suspect: am I not their biological child? If there were no relevant provocation, no emotional background stirring me, I would not be able to doubt this question—although, as a question in the purely truth-seeking sense, it is always a valid one. Even if my parents treat me very well, I still may not be their biological child. As a scientist, I can at any time investigate whether someone is someone else’s child, but as a son, I cannot at any time raise this question. When, disregarding feeling and without regard to context, I seriously question some issue, scientific rigor cannot justify my act of disobedience.
Truth is not everything. The pursuit or neglect of truth, harshness or looseness in relation to truth, is often driven by specific contexts and emotions; we cannot set these emotional backgrounds aside and look only at what is true or false. Of course, when we decide to begin investigating whether something is true or false, we ought to hope to exclude emotional interference as much as possible and be objective and rigorous. But affirming the content of a question does not mean affirming the act of questioning itself; disputing the content of a report does not mean denying the act of reporting itself.
However, what has been discussed above is a narrow sense of “truth”: the truth of scientists, objective, cold, ruthless, but not the truth of “genuine feelings.” How, in the sense of genuine feeling, does one truthfully report an event? For instance, “Zhang San, through DNA comparison, successfully unraveled the mystery of his own origins” is an accurate report, but is it true? If Zhang San’s original purpose in making this investigation was to evade the responsibility of supporting his parents and thereby to draw a line between himself and the parents who had painstakingly raised him, then does the above report of “success” really hit the truth? At such a moment, a more fitting headline might be: “By resorting to DNA comparison, Zhang San finally severed ties with his parents.” But if Zhang San’s purpose in severing ties with his parents was to avoid implicating them (for example, in debt collection, collective punishment, and so on), then how should that be reported?
Some may say: if you simply explain all the causes and effects, inside and out, before and after, wouldn’t that do it? However, the background of history can be traced back infinitely. Where exactly should one stop? Where exactly should one begin? How should the arrangement of what is emphasized and what is glossed over be handled? None of this can be solved by simply “explaining everything clearly.” Any historical report must necessarily have a perspective; it must necessarily be the result of some kind of selection, weighing, and adjudication, and the criteria for selection and omission do not depend solely on “truth,” but more on the reporter’s value judgment.
Confucius’s “Spring and Autumn brushwork” is precisely such a craft: of course, not fabricating facts is a basic requirement, but the craft of writing history goes far beyond that, and is not about using neutral, objective, accurate, and exhaustive language to report the truth. Every stroke of pen and knife contains an evaluative praise or blame. In terms of strictness and precision of expression, “The marquis of Zheng subdued Duan at Yan” is probably inferior to “The duke of Zheng campaigned against his younger brother at Yan,” but Confucius used the former formulation in order to express his censure of Duke Wu of Zheng.
I remember arguing some time ago with a senior fellow in leftist Chinese philosophy (the reason I slap on the label “leftist Chinese philosophy” is not that I want to “put a hat on” him, but to hint at a certain sense of paradox): he condemned Southern Weekly-style reporting on “high-speed train luxury procurement,” saying that such reports confused the concepts of EMUs and high-speed rail and should have pointed out that problems were found only on some EMUs. He believed that this wording smacked of inciting a certain public opinion orientation and deviated from objectivity. Not coincidentally, after this Secretary Lin incident, Southern Weekly-style reporting with the wording “Lin so-and-so denies the Great Famine” was protested on Weibo by “People’s Daily Gansu Channel”: Secretary Lin clearly only questioned whether the number of people who starved to death was really that high—how could you report it as “denial”?
First of all, we can confirm that Southern Weekly-style reporting did not fabricate facts. Everyday language is not always exact scientific terminology; every word has a certain ambiguity—for example, “deny” — what does “deny” mean? If the Nagoya mayor says that the Japanese army killed only 3,000 people in Nanjing, should that be called “denial” or “questioning the numbers”? Of course, saying that Secretary Lin was questioning the number of people who starved to death is, from a scientific point of view and from the standpoint of objectivity, perhaps indeed more rigorous and more neutral. But the question is: at such a moment, is what the reporter is pursuing really this neutrality? Or should the media, in the first place, learn from “Spring and Autumn brushwork” and, in concise reporting, incorporate feelings of praise and blame?
Should Confucius have written the Spring and Autumn Annals in a format like “Duke Wu of Zheng attacked his younger brother Duan and successfully killed him at the place called Yan,” if he wanted to be more rigorous? Or is it that only Confucius is allowed to play this game of cutting and polishing the record, while modern people can only honestly do scientific research?
In the article “Rumor” I argued that modern media ought to be the successor to the ancient “folk ballads” that criticized politics through indirect satire, and should accordingly shoulder the mission of “spreading rumors.” Now I want to say that this mission can derive from the Book of Songs, and it can also derive from the Spring and Autumn Annals. The former expresses public sentiment from the bottom up; the latter guides praise and blame from the top down. The mission of the media is not to indoctrinate people with truth, nor is it to sing of universal harmony and prosperity, but to convey and guide opinion.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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