Netflix’s new adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude recently launched, giving me a chance to revisit this book.
When we talk about magical realism, we reflexively think of Latin America. In my view, this is purely the pot calling the kettle black, with zero self-awareness.
The magical reality on Chinese soil is no less absurd than Latin America’s.
Let’s start with Latin America’s hundred years of solitude, and also talk about China’s century of futility.
From a literary perspective, One Hundred Years of Solitude certainly broke new ground. But intellectually, it lacks depth. Of course, this might be my personal bias against anything tainted with communist sympathies, against any writer who sympathizes with communism. Lu Xun is like this, García Márquez is like this. These are all second-rate writers whose words seem brilliant but lack genuine insight, who can sense problems but can’t pinpoint the real disease. Compared to thinkers like Dostoevsky, who fiercely criticized socialist thought from its inception with truly prescient vision that transcended his era, the gap is immeasurable.
Let me give one example. The banana republic in the book is frequently cited by some as evidence of American imperialism or capitalism’s evil deeds in other countries. But if you examine it closely, the direct murderers who shot three thousand workers and dumped their bodies in the sea were the local government. We can certainly argue that capital was the mastermind behind it all, but this actually reveals from another angle that Macondo’s true nature was far from the pure innocence corrupted by capital that the author portrays—its barbarism and disregard for human life were its original cultural DNA. The local government put a cheap price tag on the lives under its jurisdiction, acted as middlemen to profit from the difference, then transnational capital placed the order, resulting in a more cost-effective strike solution—massacre. So tell me, who bears more responsibility here?
You could argue that the shooters were all damned outsiders, Wang Debiao and his hard drives, while all the Macondo folks were good people. But this argument is weak—when the water level of an entire society’s values is there, how can you alone remain untainted? Put Macondo people in other places as soldiers, and they’d shoot to kill just as readily. This is corroborated later when the colonel’s personal guards razed the entire family of a widow who offended him.
What impressed me most in the book was this massacre—three thousand workers slaughtered, loaded onto trains, and dumped at sea. Then when José, the sole surviving ghost, went back to ask people about it, nobody remembered it happening, as if the massacre never occurred. You know what? This magical reality feels incredibly familiar. In early June this year, many internet platforms banned messaging and changing avatars, and young people asked: Is this because of the college entrance exams?
The dead are gone, but the heavy burden remains with the living who cannot forget. So as I age, I increasingly understand and respect Mr. Xiaobo’s life choices after June 4th.
The character I most identify with and reflect upon is naturally the colonel. Beyond our similar INTJ personalities, there are similar political aspirations. The colonel’s initial reason for taking up arms was witnessing the Conservative government’s election fraud and the military authority beating a woman bitten by a rabid dog to death in the street. Driven by this sense of justice to declare war on the Conservative government, after twenty years of war, he ultimately became a cold-blooded tyrant himself.
“You hate those people so much, fought them for so long, and ultimately became just like them. No ideal in this world is worth such degradation as its price.”
—García Márquez
So why would I want to be a rebel? On a personal level, it’s my hatred of privilege. On a larger scale, it’s my inability to tolerate this country’s deliberately designed systemic injustice. When I explain China’s dynastic cycles to foreign friends, when a Greek friend asked which was the most recent dynasty, I could only tell him that China is still under dynastic rule. Except for flying the communist banner, the actual logic of rule is no different from any previous dynasty—five hundred families rule China. More than half the country’s wealth is controlled by about two-thousandths of the population, roughly three million people. China has 1.4 billion people, but 80% of medical resources are spent on about eight million retired cadres. Tax burden ranks among the world’s highest, yet without corresponding public responsibility. Smart people enjoy their peaceful years, ordinary people remain ignorant, leaving idealistic fools to worry about the nation.
The colonel fought over thirty battles but left no political legacy, changed nothing. Watching the colonel’s twenty years of futile struggle makes me wonder—perhaps the real battlefield lies outside the military, perhaps the solutions that can truly break us out of historical cycles aren’t found between gun barrels but on paper, in people’s hearts. Some old bastard said political power grows from the barrel of a gun. Countless later idiots took this as gospel. But look at China’s century of achieving nothing, and you’ll know gun barrels changed nothing, didn’t change anything in any good way. Today’s regime is still a continuation of two thousand years of the Qin system. The Communist regime’s stability is even less than monarchy—every succession moment is a time of political turmoil.
The first goal of Chinese revolution is to establish constitutionalism. This must accompany the Communist Party’s split or collapse. When this will happen is completely unpredictable. Like many authoritarian regimes, it might collapse overnight, or it might endure a long winter. I lean toward the latter, because the mutual distrust in our ethnic history and culture, the lack of negotiation, compromise, and promise-keeping, means the game will be zero-sum and deadly.
I can’t help recalling what Professor Yang Xiaokai said—it’s best if China doesn’t have a revolution, a bloodless Glorious Revolution like England’s would be ideal. People always hope for quick success, but the result is haste makes waste. The aftereffects of rushing change are too severe. Like the elderly Sun Yat-sen abandoning the proper Anglo-American path to emulate Soviet Russia, bringing the specter of communism and profound disaster to the nation. The ultimate solution still lies in advancing education, in raising the public’s intellectual water level. Though this approach is slow, measured in long epochs, it’s the most stable path with the fewest aftereffects.
“To absorb European civilization, one must tackle the difficult before the easy—first transform hearts and minds, then change policies, and finally achieve tangible material progress. Following this sequence, though difficult, faces no real obstacles and can smoothly achieve its goals. Reverse the order, and what seems easy becomes impossible.”
—Fukuzawa Yukichi
And educational change fundamentally begins with philosophical change. After reading much intellectual history, I now realize that Chinese Confucian culture was left far behind by Greek philosophy from its very inception. The thoughts of Plato and Aristotle still shine brilliantly after two thousand years. While Confucius and Laozi, by comparison, were just somewhat clever but not very clever old men.
Especially when reading this passage in intellectual history, I was struck with admiration:
Limited democracy is the best state we can hope for. The state is governed by law, a ‘mixed government’: democratic in quantity and aristocratic in quality. Politics is based on laws so that everyone can be free, and many citizens can have a say. The middle class should have the most power—neither rich nor poor. Government members are numerous enough for broad representation, yet few enough to ensure transparency. This provides the best balance between public opinion and intelligent administration. Most importantly, this is the most feasible form of government.
—Aristotle, summarized in A History of Western Thought
Two contemporaries—Aristotle’s thought encompassed patterns that two thousand years of global political development haven’t surpassed. Meanwhile, Confucius was still advocating for reviving Zhou rituals, which was already antiquated even then. And China’s two thousand years of culture has just been patching and mending on this foundation that wasn’t very advanced from birth, binding its own feet. This is the deep reason why China’s social organization hasn’t fundamentally changed in two thousand years. As Hegel said, “China has no history, only endless repetition of dynastic collapse and replacement, with the entire nation making no progress in the process.”
Like Latin America, for China to truly change and break out of the fatalistic cycle of one hundred years of solitude, the fundamental requirement is philosophical change. Social revolution is first a revolution of ideas—how people view important questions, what perspective they use to face the world, how they see others, what imagined identity they use to build community. These things may seem abstract, but they’re more real than anything. Meanwhile, what materialists call the material base that determines the superstructure—though visible and tangible, bringing China visible prosperity over twenty years—neither influenced the superstructure nor filled the spiritual void. In the end, it was all for nothing—what was earned by luck was lost through incompetence.