This is the sixty-fifth chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
As is now customary in Other People’s Thoughts, this latest chapter includes a number of short videos.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
10 September 2025
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Other People’s Thoughts I-LXIV:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LXV
Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. … Everything was normal until it wasn’t anymore.
— Victor Klemperer, Language of the Third Reich: LTI; Lingua Tertii Imperii, trans. Martin Brady, Bloomsbury, 2013
成敗
In a fascinating conversation on Concurrent, a Chinese investor sums up youth anxiety as follows: “In China, everyone believes the state will ultimately succeed, but no one knows whether they’ll be the victor or the price paid for victory.”
— Afra, China OS vs. America OS, Concurrent, 1 August 2025
Power Relations
“The world is no doubt always changing,” he wrote in “Revolution in the Third World,” adding, “But there is nothing to indicate that the course of a history founded on power relationships, where the well-being of the conquerors is nourished on the blind servitude of the victims and the pain of the vanquished, can be changed.”
— Gérard Chaliand, Intrepid Authority on Geopolitics, Dies at 91, The New York Times, 27 August 2025
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The Atmosphere
You think that’s freedom you’re breathing?
What am I breathing?
Oppression.
[coughs]
— Roy Wood Jr, Ziwe Interviews, March 2025
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Soviet humour for the Trump era
A man walks by a newspaper stand every day. Each day, he buys a copy of Pravda. He scans the front page and then tosses the paper into the trash.
After this has gone on for a while, the newsstand guy asks, “You always look at just the front of the newspaper but never inside. What’s up with that?”
“I’m looking for an obituary,” replies the man.
“An obituary? But all those are in the back of the paper…”
“No,” says the man, “The one I’m looking for will be on page one.”
Lies Agreed Upon
If … we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish.
It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is “lies agreed upon”; and to point out the danger in such misinformation. It is indeed extremely doubtful if any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action. Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?
— W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Propaganda of History’, in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935)
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愛什麼愛？
***
Modi’s India and Trump’s America
Q: I would love to hear your thoughts on how you view parallels between the Hindu-nationalist movement in India and the MAGA movement here in the United States.
A: There are a lot of parallels. One of the first things that happened when Modi came to power was demonetization — this direct hit on the economy, where he said 500-rupee notes were illegal, like, overnight. If you look at the attack on citizenship, the attack on universities, the attack on students, the attack on Rohingyas, the continuous uncertainty, the fact that you might be ambushed by anything at any time — it’s so similar that you wonder, is there a playbook or is it just osmotic authoritarian behavior? The ruling party is confused with the government and all of it is confused with one man. So you’re seeing that in the U.S., and I look at it in shock. You thought that there was a mechanism in place, there were checks and balances in place. But clearly there isn’t a way of handling someone who’s completely out of control. The way statisticians are being fired for giving out figures that the authoritarian doesn’t agree with — same thing here, you can’t believe any of the government figures on economics because everything that doesn’t suit the ruling establishment is dismissed, it’s thrown away, and a new picture is put in its place.
The one big difference is that in India, the mainstream media has completely compromised. It’s not just rolled over, it is actually an organ of the authoritarian state. It’s actually calling for people’s arrest or making up lies. And of course America is sitting on top of a crumbling world.
Whatever Trump does affects the whole world, whereas here, it just affects this country.
— Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Arundhati Roy on How to Survive in a ‘Culture of Fear’, The New York Times, 30 August 2025
Unaliving Nazis
This goes back to my childhood, when I would daydream of running over John Howard with a steamroller, or kicking him into the zoo’s lion enclosure, or refracting a laser beam through his goggle-glasses to melt his face off. My mother raised me to have a Manchurian Candidate style response to John Howard, I’m afraid. The first time I seriously got in trouble at school was in year two when I drew a fairly graphic illustration of Pauline Hanson being beheaded by a guillotine, with John Howard waiting in line behind her — I believe if I’d fallen off at least one balcony, I could have been the next Bill Leak. During the Bush years, I’d lay awake at night cooking up specs for Lee Harvey Oswald x Android 18 crossovers to arrive from a parallel future and blast the President’s goofy cowboy ass to skull and bones etc.
There’s been countless riffs on these Quixotic delusions over the years.
Politicians, fascists, journalists, and Nazis of all stripes are the only people I’ve ever seriously dreamed of hurting — the only people I’ve longed to, well, end. This want feels baked into me. I grew up around a lot of WW2 veterans, radical unionists, and old Communists, and I guess the one thing they imparted on me, other than the fact that intergenerational alcohol abuse was good and fun, was that all Nazis must die. It’s the only way to sort their sort out. I want my scalps! It really is that simple.
— Patrick Marlborough, 1 September 2025
9.3 閱兵
那些看著閱兵式就顱內高潮，盛贊“中國排面”的愛國粉應該知道：
一：這些強大的武器方陣就是你行走的社保，醫保，退休金，稅，罰款，房貸……
二：我國領導幹部的子女沒有一個去俄朝這些來捧場的“友好國家”留學，置業，結婚生子。他們都在美日歐加澳這些敵國，呼籲你去當炮灰。
— 李承鹏，X， 2025年9月3日
臺上臺下
你崇拜人，我崇拜制度。現在的問題是：台上依然演得很認真，台下已經沒有觀眾了。一個顯而易見的事實是，玉石沒人買了，字畫沒人藏了，核桃沒人盤了，天珠沒人收了，藏獒沒人養了，紅木沒人捧了，茅台沒人囤了，連普爾茶也沒人炒了。最重要的是，房子沒人買了，妹子沒人追了，婚不願意結了⋯⋯
— 網絡所見者
The Epstein Files
…Trump, not the champion they had expected from his campaign days, but a sulphurous sack of curdled testosterone, blowing off their calls for justice and transparency. It would have been easy—and smart—for him to appease MAGA with some words of empathy for the irreparably harmed women who had the courage to speak out. But, seated against a background of the Oval’s new imperial gilt decor (musician Jack White recently likened it on social media to “a gaudy professional wrestler’s dressing room”), Trump belittled the “Epstein whatever” as a tactic “to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant to the success we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president.” Wah, wah, wah. Not gonna work. Reaching for the hoary old trope of a “Democrat hoax” insults Trump’s base after so many years of promising to expose the probably mythical list of Epstein’s powerful co-abusers. And for devotees used to being fed red meat in the Trump colosseum, tariff talk, tripe about trilaterals, and Trumpian swagger about “stopping seven wars” are not the juice that feeds the beast.
— Tina Brown, Trump’s Big Mistake, Fresh Hell, 4 September 2025
Red and Expert
One of the things that I did when I was writing this book was to try to confront head-on whether we needed something like free speech and free thinking in order to drive a lot of innovation, as well as dynamism.And I’m not sure that these are terribly important. If we take a look at a lot of highly autocratic regimes — regimes that I would say are more autocratic than China today, namely Stalin’s Soviet Union as well as Hitler’s Germany — these were also regimes that ended up producing a lot of state-driven innovation.
If we take a look at the record of Soviet science, there were a lot of Nobel Prize winners that barely staggered out of gulags in the Soviet Union before they made their great prizewinning innovations.
A lot of Soviet military scientists, fighter jet scientists, nuclear scientists had all been persecuted by Stalin himself. Also, with Nazi Germany, there were breakthroughs in rocketry and fighter jets in spite of a highly autocratic, fascist, totalitarian regime.
I think what matters a lot for innovation is simply the funding.
Sometimes they really care about free speech. Sometimes they care about creative expression. But for many of them, they’re able to make breakthroughs if you just give them a really big lab.
— Dan Wang, Does the Future Belong to China?, The New York Times, 4 September 2025
It is trying to engineer the population again to try to encourage people to have children. So far, it’s finding that it’s much easier to prevent births with sterilizations and abortions rather than to coerce copulation.
— Dan Wang
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***
IR Extinction
Academia has become a credential Ponzi scheme, where students accumulate diplomas for jobs that no longer exist, studying liberal theories in a post-liberal world. The endowed chairs are full, but the discipline is hollow. IR, once a theory of power, has become a funeral procession for the world it failed to understand.
— The End of IR, Alan’s Substack, 19 July 2025
Gone All Queer
Lesbians, in particular, were hit hardest by queer ideology. Traditional Lesbian spaces were infiltrated and repurposed, with dyke bars disappearing and often replaced by generic “queer” venues dominated by men, or opposite sex attracted womyn, and featuring pornified aesthetics. The term “lesbian” itself was stigmatized in favor of labels like “queer,” “WLW,” “AFAB,” or “non-men,” all of which erase the specificity of female homosexuality. This erasure is reflected by the depth of the misogyny and gynophobia queer theory sought to reestablish: female people MUST be prepared to accommodate others. Female sexual disinterest in the opposite sex has always been a threat to the habitus. It poses a fundamental challenge to androcentric ideologies.
The queer takeover has atomized the gay and lesbian movement, leaving it without a cohesive community or shared material interests. What once united people around common struggles has fragmented into a constantly shifting terrain of individualized identities. Terms like “demibisexual grayromantic nonbinary transfemmes” and countless variations now dominate, making solidarity and collective action increasingly impossible.
As a result, political demands have shifted away from liberation from patriarchy or heterosexism. Instead, they focus on validation, identity performance, and “visibility,” prioritizing personal recognition over systemic reformation. …
Queerness didn’t “join” the gay and lesbian liberation movement—it replaced it. It infiltrated a struggle for liberation, and turned it into an incoherent spectacle of identity confusion, individualism, and performative so-called “allyship”. What once was a powerful movement for material liberation and sexual autonomy has been gutted. In its place stands a neoliberal, commodified, and misogynist caricature—a “queer” utopia that accomplishes nothing, misrepresents homosexuality, and makes a personal identity into a lukewarm political stance.
— Sasha S. Graham, The Homophobia of Queerness, Into the Badlands, 4 September 2025
Stupidity
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, d.1945, Letters and Papers from Prison, 1951
無酒字之酒頌
液體之火
讓你
若夢若醒
飄飄欲仙
讓天地顛倒
讓世界旋轉
把人類歷史
澆灌的跌宕起伏
將琴棋書畫
熏染的色彩斑斕醉了劉伶
狂了詩仙
張揚了曹孟德
書寫了鴻門宴
濕了清明杏花雨
瘦了海棠李易安
景陽岡上
助武松三拳斃虎
潯陽樓頭
縱宋江題詩造反
你啊你
成全了多少英雄豪傑
放倒了多少村夫莽漢歌舞與你相佐
美色與你為伴
催詩情萬丈
壯文人斗胆
有人借你發瘋
有人借你奪權
有時你只是一個道具
烘托一下談判桌上的氛圍
有時你更像一種暗器
把貪杯的對手麻翻
你呀你
既入朱門豪宅
又進村捨陋院
既流溢皇室的金樽
又盛滿農家的粗碗
愁也要你
喜也要你
洞房花燭夜
他鄉遇故知
金榜題名時
遷徙流放的囚犯
落魄的文人騷客
得志的朝廷大員
都是你的知己
你的夥伴
甚至
即將上路的死囚
都要你為之餞別因為你
耽誤了多少大事
因為你
弄出了多少冤案
因為你
鮮活了多少逸事趣聞
因為你
催生了多少佳作名篇
更因為你
造就了多少人的肝癌
而魂歸天堂
真的是
成也有你
敗也有你
生也有你
死也有你
你這澆愁愁更愁的瓊漿啊
窮也有你
富也有你
千家萬戶還都離不開你。
— 王玲，2018高考作文
***
Censoring Banksy
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Dignity
There is something about the human spirit, my grandmother would say, that withstands all attempts at offence, injury or humiliation — something other species are incapable of, because they are incapable of thoughts disconnected from their immediate existence. We call it dignity. It was a concept through which she seemed to have found a way of reconciling herself with the twists and turns of her life — the one thing she believed she could hold on to even in the depths of great tragedy. “We lost everything,” she would often say, “but we did not lose our dignity, because dignity has nothing to do with money, honour or titles. It’s about doing the right thing.”
— Lea Ypi, How to think about surveillance, Financial Times, 6 September 2025
Trump is threatening to sue me. Again.
If you want to make this a public circus, we’ll happily juggle flaming chainsaws while you fumble like a walrus trying to fuck a greased beachball.
— Rick Wilson, 10 September 2025
AI: Who Can You Trust?
Hinton has just returned from Shanghai, jet-lagged, following meetings with members of the politburo. They invited him to talk about “the existential threat of AI”.
“China takes it seriously. A lot of the politicians are engineers. They understand this in a way lawyers and salesmen don’t,” he adds. “For the existential threat, you only need one country to figure out how to deal with it, then they can tell the other countries.”
Can we trust China to preserve all human interests? “That is a secondary question. The survival of humanity is more important than it being nice. Can you trust America? Can you trust Mark Zuckerberg?”
— Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton: ‘AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer’, Financial Times, 6 September 2025
三世
How we have travelled, Mel! Always fleeing, always seeking, always deceiving ourselves, never arriving. Anchored to the Past, dreaming of the Future, and—in some fatal, blind sense-oblivious to the Present.
— Oliver Sacks, December 1966, Letters, p.127
post hoc exilium ostende
Lists of regrets, manufacture of dreams! I say to myself: Why did I leave Santa post hoc exilium ostende Monica? Beaches, white foam, Topanga, friends, the exhilaration which saturated every day. Bah! But what madness to leave San Francisco! Aerial, hilly, New Jerusalem. Or why did I not stay in the wilds, in the backwoods of Canada, a lumberman and poet? Or was not the real spitefulness ever to leave London—my only, wondrous London—my home, and the home of my people? Or was the real and ultimate sadness to grow up, to leave the Magic Region of childhood, the time of wish-fulfilment and infinite power, the feeling of love and an endless future?
IDIOCY! It is all idiocy and vain regrets. Fatally easy to transfigure the past, to see in it millennia of epic happiness followed by cruel unmerited expulsions. It is the myth of Genesis all over again. In anticipation every move is an Exodus, and in retrospect every move is a Genesis. Did I not cross the ocean to the New World, the Vita Nuova, on the 27th birthday, the symbol of Rebirth? And was not California prejudged as El Dorado or the Fleece of Gold? And New York, in turn, as the Ultimate Metropolis-rich, brilliant, ablaze with promise-that same false promise which drew Dick Whittington* to London Town six hundred years ago?
— Oliver Sacks, December 1966, Letters, p.127
閱兵奪睛
朝鮮中央通訊社對金正恩參加今年中共抗戰勝利80週年閱兵式的報導：
“舉世無雙的偉大統帥、時代最光輝的太陽、無敵的革命戰略家、偉大的思想和實踐的化身、社會主義強國建設的偉大舵手、朝鮮勞動黨和民主主義共和國的尊嚴與榮光、我們黨和人民無限崇敬和熱愛的偉大領導者、朝鮮勞動黨的總書記、朝鮮民主主義共和國國務委員長、共和國武力的最高司令官、全世界進步人類衷心仰慕和頌揚的偉大太陽般的領袖金正恩同志，繼承發揚了偉大領袖金日成主席和偉大領導者金正日總書記革命遺志的莊嚴事業中以無以倫比的膽識和卓越的遠見，引領我黨和人民開創了自主尊嚴的新時代，贏得了全民族和全人類無限信仰和信賴，應兄弟的中華人民共和國黨和政府的盛情而隆重的邀請，我們偉大的元首、光輝的民族太陽金正恩同志將於9月3 號親臨中華人民共和國舉行的抗戰法西斯80週年的盛大閱兵儀式。偉大金正恩同志的光輝步伐，將為世界反法西斯勝利歷史的宏偉慶典添增無比的尊嚴和榮光，正如天地供養的太陽，驅散陰霾，照耀大地。偉大元首金正恩同志的臨席，將使這場慶典熠熠生輝，顯示出不可動搖的……”
— 高瑜，X，2025年9月5日
The Advancement of Knowledge
For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture.
— Francis Bacon, 1605
Youth is quick to fade, yet learning is hard to attain;
not a single inch of time should be taken lightly.
While still dreaming of spring grasses by the pond,
the leaves before the steps already rustle with autumn’s sound.
少年易老學難成，一寸光陰不可輕。
未覺池塘春草夢，階前梧葉已秋聲。
— Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130–1200), ‘A Poem Urging the Pursuit of Learning’ 勸學詩, trans. Jian Xu
Nothing to Choose These Days
I return to New York about September 15. It will be my last year, because I can’t stand the American Scene any more. (Did you read about the clubbings, etc. in Chicago? When Nixon comes in, as he must, I see that the lights will go out all over America, and a brutally repressive police-state will become a daily reality. There is nothing to choose, these days, between Russia and America-or the Pope, for that matter.) I think Western Europe, poor, dilapidated, pessimistic as it is, is now the sole repository of the possibilities of civilization. The rest of the world will be resolved into monstrous, lying, warring Superpowers, and their pitiful squashed satellites.
— Oliver Sacks, 31 August 1968, Letters (2024), p.139