Of course, I am very happy and satisfied that my "General History of the World" can meet Chinese readers.However, I also feel a little uneasy, because I worry that Chinese readers will not give enough criticism when reading it.One should criticize everything one reads because we are living in a time when nothing can be accepted as pure truth or complete model. Looking around the world in the late 20th century, we will notice a world in trouble, a world where everything is messed up and everything is changing upside down.This is true not only for one country or one social system, but also for the whole world, and it is also true for the underdeveloped third world, the developed socialist second world, and the developed capitalist first world.All three worlds are turning their wheels today.

Because the underdeveloped third world is falling behind, the gap between rich and poor countries, instead of narrowing, is widening, despite all our efforts during the "United Nations development decades".The development failure of the United Nations in those decades was disastrous.As a result, the situation of some third world countries today is worse than when they were colonies in the past. Therefore, what they are now entering is not the "decades of development" but the "decades of survival". The developed socialist second world also faces various serious problems. In 1961, Nikita Khrushchev boasted that by 1980, the industrial production of the Soviet Union would surpass that of the United States.But the opposite is true.The Soviet Union was not a leader but a follower when it came to today's new cutting-edge technologies.Therefore, its industrial output has lagged more and more behind the United States, and in fact it also lagged behind Japan; the Soviet Union not only failed to catch up with the United States, but also fell behind Japan.As a result, the USSR now ranks third in the global industrial hierarchy.Today, we hear dissident Andrei Sakharov and leader Mikhail Gorbachev declaring that the fundamental problem is that Soviet society and practice needs to be overhauled, That's why.

In imaginative America we find that the sun is not bright and the people are not happy.On the contrary, the United States today is also a turbulent country, with many serious problems deepening.In the past few years, it has fallen from the number one creditor country in the world to the number one debtor country.Workers lost their jobs and farmers lost their farms.American newspapers were full of stories of homeless people sleeping on the streets; growing malnutrition and hunger across the country; rising rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, and teenage suicide. In the 19th century, the whole world accepted a social model, which was Western capitalism.Today, there is no universal social model anymore, because all societies are in deep crisis.Of course, we can learn some unique technologies from abroad, but as far as the general social model is concerned, there is none to learn from.Perhaps, we should remember Chairman Mao's advice: we can learn something from negative experience.Indeed, there are many adverse experiences around the world that we should observe, consider, and benefit from.Every people on every continent and every region has their own unique problems, and they have the responsibility to come up with their own unique solutions.This is why more social experiments and social reforms are being done in the world today than at any time in human history.

I think this is a healthy and promising trend.Many catastrophes in human past history stem from the fact that social change lags far behind technological change.This is understandable, since people naturally welcome and adopt new technologies that increase productivity and living standards; however, people reject the social changes necessary for new technologies because the adoption of new ideas, new institutions, and new practices Always unpleasant.The time lag between today's technological revolutions and the corresponding social revolutions that technological revolutions require is a fundamental cause of the dilemma that peoples of the first, second and third worlds find themselves in today.

For example, thanks to modern technology, the world currently produces more food than it needs.If these foods were distributed equally, we would have a world where people were obese, however, these foods are not distributed equally.Because of our refusal to accept changes in society, the gap between the poor and the rich in each nation, and the gap between the poor and the rich all over the world, instead of shrinking, has grown wider.So in our time, after the age-old productivity problem was first solved, more people are malnourished and starving than ever before.Likewise, scientists warn us that modern nuclear weapons threaten humanity with the danger of nuclear winter, or human self-destruction.Yet all nations continue to equip themselves and prepare for war as if we were fighting not with hydrogen bombs, space weapons and poison gas but with spears and bows.The above examples illustrate how serious and frightening the time lag between technological and social revolutions can be.

Albert Einstein was both a great scientist and a great prophet.After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki incidents, he warned us immediately: "The lethality of the atomic bomb has changed everything except our way of thinking, so that we will gradually fall into an unprecedented catastrophe." Unfortunately, Einstein The plunge into the catastrophe that admonishes us to avoid continues until now.We have a responsibility to wake up people and take seriously Einstein's warnings to us.The future of mankind depends on the degree of consciousness of people; I hope that my book can contribute to people's consciousness.