Chapter 12 Bo Yang is still influencing "people of the 1980s"

Chen Xiaoming I would like to do some research on the concepts of "the 1980s", "people in the 1980s", "Bo Yang's thought in the 1980s" and "the influence of Bo Yang's thought on people in the 1980s" proposed by Mr. Zhu Honghai in this paper. Click Supplementary Notes. I think it is very meaningful for Mr. Zhu Honghai to put forward the concept of "the 1980s".This era, I understand it as a "highly condensed" era, in fact it compressed the entire 1970s.So the 1970s became a "super-historical" existence in a weird way, and the accumulation of those broken things exploded in the 1980s, including the accumulation of human resources.I am a college student in the seventh and seventh grades. I was eighteen years old at the time, the youngest in the class. After graduating at the age of twenty, I stayed in school to teach. My oldest student was thirty-five years old. Material resources can be said to be in a very chaotic state. It has compressed several generations, and the 1970s and 1980s were compressed together as a whole. This is how I understand it.

Second, it is also the compression of several trends of thought. After the "Cultural Revolution", we had a "Thought Emancipation Movement", also known as "Correcting Chaos".It was the first to introduce the latest Western trends of thought, including the history of science, literary theory, Western sociology, and philosophy.This makes the younger generation very excited. We even get up at three or four o'clock in the morning to buy books. As long as they are from the West, we accept them all. Third, I think it is the accumulation of countless historical wishes.In such an era of compression, people have great historical aspirations, the main of which is of course to realize the "four modernizations".At that time, we knew that Hong Kong and Taiwan were all in Asia and belonged to China, but they developed so fast.I remember that a film director wrote an article at that time, saying that he went to Japan after visiting Hong Kong and Taiwan, and sat on the steps of Ginza, Japan, crying.He said that after 1945, Japan was a ruin of war, and mainland China was at the same historical starting point at that time. Why is Japan like this now?So he sat there and wept bitterly.In fact, our generation has a deep love for the country and the nation, that is, "sorrow for its backwardness, and anger for its inability to fight." We often think, why are we in such a situation?Therefore, the reflection and criticism of tradition at that time was actually based on such a huge desire for the revitalization of the country and the nation.But because it is difficult to express this desire, it turned into a cold criticism and denunciation of past traditions.

Mr. Zhu Honghai mentioned in the article that Mr. Bo Yang's thoughts entered the Chinese mainland in the mid-1980s, which coincided with the trend of thinking about traditional reflection at that time. I think this grasp is very accurate.Mainland China's reflection on tradition, from the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1980s, has been discussed in many seminars, but everyone feels that the criticism of tradition is not strong enough.In other words, these critiques express a lot of realistic sentiment, but fail to find a strong source.There is one phenomenon that I want to explain, that is, the relationship with the "May 4th Movement" became very ambiguous in the early 1980s, and criticism of tradition was rarely raised during this period.But when Mr. Bo Yang's declarative quotations appeared, I think they provided a very important support and evidence for the younger generation's reflection on tradition. It was like a match that ignited something, so the materials smoldering there suddenly It glows, and I think its significance is very great.

Finally, it is about further influence, that is, when Bo Yang arrived in the 1990s, those people in the 1980s have become an important pillar of society. After the baptism and tempering of the times, what kind of influence will these people have on the 1990s? ?I think Mr. Bo Yang's comprehensive and profound dissection of Chinese people is still influencing "people in the 1980s"! (The author is a professor at Peking University, and this article is the author's speech at the 2003 International Symposium on Bo Yang's Thoughts on Literary History.)