Seeds of Fire

不在沈默中爆發
就在沈默中死亡

Silence has been a theme of China Heritage since its founding in 2016. In that year, the last in the first five-year installment of the Xi Jinping Era, the basic tenor of the unfolding ‘New Era’ in modern Chinese history was more than evident. As I observed to the cohort of younger scholars that I addressed when launching China Heritage in December 2016:

You have all worked out and will continue to negotiate your own relationship with the Chinese world. Today, I would suggest, you are all faced with the latest version of, to take an expression from Lu Xun, ‘Silent China’ 無聲的中國 (also translated as ‘Voiceless China’).

Clamorous public debate — circumscribed and self-censored discourse even at the best of times — has been gradually corralled. That is not to say that there is a dearth of noise or verbiage in the People’s Republic, or a lack of boisterous chatter on its global web, but the Storm and Fury is increasingly limited to the stentorian messages of the party-state and its loyalists, although sometimes they sound more like a threnody that repeats itself and reverberates like the death-bed message of the emperor in Kafka’s Great Wall of China. For me, this new phase of Silent China reached something of a nadir with the closing of Consensus Net 共識網 in early October this year. It was supposedly taken offline for ‘disseminating erroneous ideas’ 傳遞錯誤思想.

The present silencing of China began in earnest around the new year of 2013, shortly after Xi Jinping’s investiture as party-state-army leader. That was when Southern Weekend was attacked for advocating ‘constitutionalism’, a code expression for limiting Communist Party power (see China Story Yearbook 2013: Civilising China). The silence of China’s Others has spread, and I would emphasise that the pall of The Silence has been partly enabled by the policies of the US Obama administration.

As I think about China today l’m taken back once more to 1971, the year I participated in that ABC panel discussion ‘Leave Something for Us’. That was also the year when, as part of our high school ancient history class, I first read selections from Tacitus’ Annals. That historian, who chronicled the rule of the emperors Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, famously wrote:

Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

They made a desert and they call it peace

Or, as Lord Byron poetically recast these words in Bride of Abydos:

Mark where his carnage and his conquests cease!
He makes a solitude, and calls it — peace.

— from Cutting a Deal with China

As I have further observed in Contra Trump, a China Heritage series launched on the eve of the 2024 US presidential election, the pall of silence, complicity and compromise is hardly limited to modern China.

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Since 2020, many of China’s messy discordant voices — independent-minded academics, citizen journalists, rights lawyers, feminists and cultural rowdies — have been stifled, or at least educated in the ways of silence and acquiescent. This has left the way open for local opinionators, New China Experts and hoards of China Maxxers to bloviate, celebrate and cash in. For more on this subject, see Kumbaya China: I’ve Seen the Future, a multipart chapter in Seeds of Fire, in particular:

• 2026 — A Brave New 1984;
• Covid Lessons for Kumbayistas; and,
• Yinfi on How China’s Velvet Prison Goes Global

It is not surprising that the particular silence of the Xi Jinping era is often enhanced by the unseemly clamour of yes-men and yes-women, both Chinese and foreign. When Silence, the poem by Jian Li translated and discussed in this chapter of Seeds of Fire was published by China Thought Express in March 2026, a clutch of such creatures, including noted shills for Sino-Fascism, were assembled at the China Development Forum 2026 in Beijing. The invited foreign friends included some of the usual suspects, such as Graham Allison and Jeffrey Sachs, as well as eager high-end China Maxxers like Adam Tooze, a tirelessly self-promoting FIFO statistician from Columbia University. Along with other participants in that party-state PR event, such elite influencers and foreign friends are well practiced in the dual art of knowing when and how to speak out as well as just how to maintain a judicious silence or, in Chinese, 守默 shǒu mò.

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Ruszkik haza! — ‘Russians Go Home!’ — the Hungarian chant from 1956 echoed through the streets of Budapest following Victor Orbán’s crushing electoral defeat on 12 April 2026.

The year 2026 marks seventy years since Mao Zedong, concerned about the rebellion of anti-Soviet liberals in Hungary in 1956, launched the Hundred Flowers Movement in China. He hoped to short circuit a similar rebellion in the PRC. Unnerved by the clamorous response of people who took advantage of the opportunity of the Hundred Flowers to criticise the Communist Party’s repressive rule, Mao then launched another nationwide campaign to crush all of the deviant ‘rightists’ who had been revealed during the Hundred Flowers. Directed by Deng Xiaoping, a logistical genius, the second campaign saw the purge, exile, jailing and demotion of over half a million people. Even after Mao’s death, Deng refused to repudiate that purge and it remains a cornerstone of the Communist Party’s justification of censorship as well as intellectual and cultural control to this day.

Xi Jinping’s China hasn’t rid itself of its Stalino-Maoist DNA, rather it celebrates it.

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***

The rubric of this chapter in Seeds of Fire: China Heritage Annual 2026 — 不在沈默中爆發，就在沈默中死亡 — is a famous line from Lu Xun’s essay In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen (記念劉和珍君), written on 1 April 1926. In English it reads:

‘Silence, silence! Unless we burst out, we shall perish in this silence!’

I am grateful to Reader #1 for commenting on the draft of this chapter and offering a number of corrections.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
18 April 2026

***

Jianli’s Old Odes, New Poems 新詩經體詩 describe a trajectory that starts in ‘the abyss of a darker time’ and tracks into the high-digital era of the present. For other works in our series Old Odes, New Poems, see:

• The Ji Clan at Mar-a-Lago;
• When to Cherish Virtue is an Indictment — the poet Jianli on Donald Trump’s America; and,
• No Thanks Given — the poet Jianli on a celebration of American amnesia.

***

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Silence

默

Jian Li 漸離

***

A Poetic Account of National Ruination

Ren Jingjing dissects Jian Li’s Silence

edited and annotated by GR Barmé

This poem is not about quietness. It is about layer upon layer of enforced muteness. It is not about one person’s mood. It is about the tragic condition of an entire age. On the surface it is a tightly wrought archaic-style poem in four-syllable lines. At its core it is an ethical script written about the fate of a state. 沈默: the title of the poem is “silence” 默 but the point of it has to do with the concept of “sinking” 沈, or submersion. The poem traces the path from the individual’s refusal to speak to a collective downward plunge into dark speechlessness. The path along which Jian Li travels in Silence is carefully calibrated and his stance is remarkably cool-headed.

From shared silence to joint ruination

In terms of its poetical form, Silence looks “classical”: it has seven stanzas, consisting of four lines each of which consists of four-syllable phrases. The schema is so regular that it appears to have stepped straight out of the Book of Songs 詩經. Each stanza reads like a short song as well as appearing like a shard of glass, the two — song and shard — cut at the same reality in different ways. The four-syllable lines naturally reflect a diction familiar from the Chinese classics, ancient inscriptions and proverbs and they bestow upon the poem a sense that the poet is speaking in a hallowed “public voice.” At the same time, this device forces the poet to compress his ideas into a minimalist structure, to squeeze a tangled situation into the simplest units of speech. This restraint in meter echoes the pressure of the theme: the shorter the line, the better it suits a time when “no one dares say more.”

The images in the poem are laid out in circles that close in, one ring after another:

The first stanza shows compliant crowds and a stilled natural world. “Mild-mannered people,” “yes-yes multitudes”: the words on the surface sound civilized and polite. People keep the rules; everyone is courteous. At first glance it looks like this is a “harmonious society.” Then come the lines “clear water not stirring” and “the deep woods are silent,” and the scene suddenly turns frigid. A pool, a stand of trees — not a hint of wind. This is not peace. It is the extinction of all movement. People and surroundings together slip into a state of “managed quietude.” The first stanza sets the tone for the whole poem: it doesn’t decry some clamorous tyranny; it examines an order that while appearing to be civilized on the surface is frozen to its core.

Note: “ ‘Yes, yes’, the common herd” 諾諾群生 is a reference a famous line by Sima Qian 司馬遷, the Grand Historian of the Han dynasty:

The refusal of one decent man
outweighs the acquiescence of the multitude.
千人之諾諾，不如一士之諤諤。

— ‘Biography of Lord Shang’
《史記 · 商君列傳第八》
trans. G.R. Barmé

Simon Leys used Sima Qian’s line as the untranslated epigraph of The Chairman’s New Clothes, his 1971 exposé of the Cultural Revolution. See One Decent Man, The New York Review of Books, 28 June 2018.) And Xu Zhangrun, as well as his supporters, have quoted it either in full or in part over the last few years when protesting against state censorship and chiding unprincipled complicity with the system. See, for example, Xu Zhangrun 許章潤, And Teachers, Then? They Just Do Their Thing!, China Heritage, 10 November 2018; and, Tao Haisu 陶海粟, Poetic Justice — a protest in verse, China Heritage, 5 April 2019.

The second stanza turns the focus to a city of fear and distorted information. A “famous city” ought to be a place of glory; here it is one that is full of dread. Life is “exile from dawn to dusk” — the city lives in a state of exile. People may not be literally on the road, but in their minds they are displaced, ready at any moment to be driven out or cast aside. They are internal exiles. Two lines are crucial:

What eyes see is not seen/
What ears hear is not real.
所見非見 / 所聞非聞

The eye does not take in what is real, the ear does not perceive what is factual. Truth has not vanished, but it has been filtered and twisted into a distorted, permitted narrative. A silent society is not a place without sound. It is a place where the clamour of “authorized voices” smothers whatever is real.

The third stanza moves to personal tragedy and the forgotten. “Screening hills” describes both the landscape and a barrier, and can be interpreted as indicating a structural wall; the “cuckoo crying out its soul” carries the traditional sense of a bloody warning, yet here the sound has been reduced to a thin, plaintive call. The sharpest lines are “Green Pearl falls from the tower / who in the Music Office makes inquiries?” Green Pearl 綠珠 is the courtesan who, under crushing power, chose to leap from a tower to preserve her dignity. The “music office” 教坊 refers to the organisation with oversight of professional entertainers who were already living on the edges of society. The couplet says: even if someone protests with their life, even if a body hits the ground from a great height, the ongoing distractions of entertainment will at most only pause for a moment. The show will soon go on as before. The death of the weak causes not even a ripple; the main melody of society plays on regardless. This is the cruelty of silence: the problem is not that no one suffers, but that the suffering does not register.

Note: Green Pearl 綠珠 was the favourite concubine of Shi Chong 石崇, an extravagantly wealthy official and poet famous for the gatherings he hosted as the Golden Valley Garden 金谷園. When political disaster struck, Green Pearl threw herself to her death from a tower in the garden, a tragic end famously commemorated by the Tang-dynasty poet Du Mu 杜牧:

The fourth stanza questions myth and the right to narrate. It strings together three interrogations: Who left Chang’e 嫦娥 behind? Who stole the elixir? Who raised the shield-and-axe in the ritual dance? From a moon goddess to imperial war ceremony, all three questions focus on one thing: who has the right to rewrite stories and arrange the script of history. “Bright heaven, illuminated, knows” 天日昭昭: Heaven is aware of the truth, as are people’s hearts. They simply pretend not to. The myths evoked here are more than a cultural reference, they are metaphors that asks who has the right to speak and tell a story? Whoever labels someone a “thief of the elixir” 竊靈藥 and someone else a “king dancing with shield and axe” 舞乾戚 controls the interpretation of history. In the imposed silence, that power continues virtually unchallenged.

Note: Heng’e 姮娥 is the original name of the Goddess of the Moon, Chang’e 嫦娥, who was believed to possess the elixir of immortality 靈藥.

“Dancing with shield and axe” 舞乾戚 is a reference to Xingtian 刑天 — the “Punisher of Heaven” — a deity who challenged the Supreme Divinity. Even after being decapitated, Xingtian continued to fight on, using his nipples as eyes and his belly button as a mouth.

“Bright heaven, illuminated, knows” 天日昭昭: upon being sentenced to death in 1142, Yue Fei 岳飛, a general framed by enemies at court, wrote these words in protest.

The fifth and sixth stanzas show the cutting of scholarly lineage and the criminalization of speech. Fu Sheng 伏生 was the old man who hid the Confucian classic Book of Documents 尚書 in a wall from the book burning of the First Emperor of Qin. Here he is “without disciples” 無徒: although there is someone to guard knowledge, there is no one willing to receive it. This line conveys a message that is darker than the “book burning” of the past. It is not that books are being destroyed; it is the fact that readers dare not step forward. “At the crossroads eyes alone” 通衢以目 is a reference to the fact that when people encounter each other at the street corner they only dare communicate with furtive glances. “Bronze men have sealed-up mouths” 金人緘口 — a reference to 金人三緘其口 a saying attributed to Confucius — evokes the famous image of statues whose lips have been sealed shut, a reference to systematised self-gagging. “The Hundred Schools are dismissed” 百家乃黜 imagines the entire spectrum of thought swept off stage holos bolus. Speaking is no longer a natural state. It is risky.

“All the world is drunk” 舉世皆醉 is a familiar line from The Fisherman 漁夫 by the exiled poet Qu Yuan 屈原. The original quote reads “The world is befouled, I alone am clean. All the world is drunk, I alone am sober” 舉世皆濁我獨清，眾人皆醉我獨醒. Here the line no longer extols the “one man who stays awake”, rather it describes collective stupefaction. The expression “rising before dawn, late to bed” 夙興夜寐 usually means to be diligent or hard working. Here it refers to a sleepless anxiety and the weariness of the few who remain clear-headed. “The speaker does not die / the speaker is guilty” 言者不死 / 言者其罪 turns the common expression “a person who speaks should not be condemned” 言者無罪 on its head. A person who tells the truth may still be alive, yet the “charge” of which they are actually accused continues to hang over his head. Or, even if the body dies, his words will remain, so “the speaker” becomes an eternal target of blame. Either way, the point here is the same: the system treats speech as a latent crime. Silence is no longer a personal choice; it is essential for survival.

Note: In 1957, as the Communist Party pursued what was known at the time as its Second Rectification Campaign (the first, launched in 1942 by Mao in Yan’an, is discussed at length in our series Drop Your Pants!), the Party announced six guiding principles that would serve to encourage people to give voice to their concerns and complaints about the self-rewarded privileges and autocratic ways that were a feature of its rule after 1949. People from all walks of life, it was announced, should feel free to:

• Speak up without hesitation if they had complaints; 知無不言
• Be allowed to say everything they wanted to, 言無不盡
• Not be condemned for what they say. 言者無罪

On their side, Party cadres were to:

• Listen to all criticisms and take heed, 聞者足戒
• Reform all errors that were uncovered, and 有則改之
• Work to improve constantly regardless. 無則加勉。

In July 1957, Mao summed up the aim of this great airing of public discontent that was something of a dialectician’s dream, not to mention being a logical absurdity, for it was to:

‘Foster a political environment that was centralised yet democratic, disciplined yet free; that forged a unified will while at the same time allowing for a sense of individual relaxation, in short, one that was both vital and lively.’

造成一個又有集中又有民主，又有紀律又有自由，又有統一意志、又有個人心情舒暢、生動活潑，那樣一種政治局面。

The resulting outpouring of discontent regarding a myriad aspects of Party governance, however, was such that over 500,000 men and women (some estimates go as high as one million) from various backgrounds were condemned for engaging in what would be deemed to be a ‘frenzied attack on the Party’ 瘋狂進攻. Mao declared that the protests were actually part of a heinous plot by ‘Rightists’ and bourgeois elements determined to overthrow the government and replace it with some sham pseudo-democratic, market-driven regime. Acting on instructions from Mao and the Politburo, Deng Xiaoping oversaw a devastating purge of the nation’s intellectual and cultural life.

The year 2026 marks the seventieth anniversary of the Hundred Flowers Movement. To this day, the Communist Party maintains that although the resulting purge of intellectual life “got out of hand” 被擴大化, fundamentally it was timely, vitally necessary and efficacious. Attempts to commemorate that fleeting moment of relative freedom of speech in 1956 have been repeatedly stifled by the authorities.

The last stanza of the poem introduces frogs and mute birds. Wild geese fly far off, beyond sight 蒙鴻遠跡. Before us lies a boundless waste 莽蕩無涯. The final two lines are the most moving: “By the cold pond, frogs croak  / Orioles and swallows though are mute” 寒池聽蛙 / 鶯燕喑啞. The water may be icy but the frogs refuse to stay quiet, their croaking a monotonous beat. The orioles and swallows that ought to flock and sing, however, are silent. The frogs represent a low thrum, the repetitive and harmless noise of permitted speech. Orioles and swallows stand for beauty, talent and a higher level of expression. In a society in which only croaking frogs are heard — the orioles and swallows having all fallen mute — silence is not an absence. It is an engineered monotony. At this point, “silence” is no longer a gap in the overall structure, it is part of the design.

The seven stanzas are arranged with a clear sense of sequence. The first sets the tone —“mild-mannered people / yes-yes multitudes” 溫溫恭人 / 諾諾群生 — the background of a society of “decent types”. The second moves into space — “a fearful famed city / exile from dawn to dusk” 淒惶名城 / 流寓晨昏 — from abstract crowds to a concrete place. The third and fourth draw heavily on historical tales and ancient legends — the “leap from the tower” 綠珠墜樓, the “theft of the elixir” 竊靈藥, the “shield-and-axe dance” 舞乾戚 from history and legend — as a mirror to reflect the present. The fifth stanza evokes institutions and learning — “Fu Sheng without disciples / bronze men with sealed mouths / the Hundred Schools all dismissed” 伏生無徒 / 通衢以目 / 金人緘口 /百家乃黜 — an indictment of the systematic blocking of speech in today’s China. In the sixth stanza the poet passes judgment: “all the world is drunk … those who speak are guilty” 舉世皆醉 / 言者其罪 while, in the final stanza, he describes a dark landscape: “by the cold pond one hears frogs croak / orioles and swallows are mute” 寒池聽蛙 / 鶯燕喑啞. This final image is one of haunted silence.

History Silenced and Universal Muteness

Jian Li’s poem Silence addresses the modern reader from within the tradition of the classic Book of Songs 詩經 shī jīng. The four-syllable lines, the structure of the stanzas, its repetitions and parallelism, images standing in for ideas — these are essential to the reinvented poetic vocabulary of Jian Li’s “Shī jīng style”.  Yet the poet does not simply imitate or quote the past. He quite consciously places his understanding of modern politics in the “high-pressure cooker” of a millennia-old classical form.

In the first place, it renews the use of analogy and implicit comparison 比興. The Book of Songs famously uses lines like “Guan-guan the ospreys” 關關雎鳩 and “Reed flowers, white dew” 蒹葭蒼蒼 to lead readers through metaphor into stories of love or ruin. For its part, lines in Silence like “clear water not moving” 清波不動 and “long woods without sound” 長林無聲 address the present age of voices silenced and censorship 一個噤聲時代. Lines such as “Green Pearl falls from the tower / who in the Music Office makes inquiries?” 綠珠墜樓 / 教坊誰問？and “by the cold pond one hears frogs / orioles and swallows are mute” 寒池聽蛙 / 鶯燕喑啞 are an obvious use of the ancient literary technique of “evoking meaning by describing objects” 以物起興. With Jian Li, however, the meaning evoked is not merely that of the personal, but rather of a tamed public sphere that is now docile.

其一，是“比興”方法的更新。《詩經》用“關關雎鳩”“蒹葭蒼蒼”來引出男女之情或亡國之痛，《默》則用“清波不動”“長林無聲”來引出一個噤聲時代。“綠珠墜樓 / 教坊誰問？”、“寒池聽蛙 / 鶯燕喑啞”，都帶有明顯的“以物起興”，但興起的不是個人生活，而是一個被全面馴化的輿論環境。

Secondly, it combines classical allusions in a new way. Fu Sheng, Green Pearl, Heng’e, the shield-and-axe dance, the bronze men, the Hundred Schools — all of these figures are drawn from vastly different historical periods and mythic contexts. The poet does not arrange them by dynasty or mechanically create equivalences. Instead, the images in the poem are akin to montage and “moments of silence” appear on different timelines: an old man hiding books, a courtesan leaping from a tower, bronze figures with sealed mouths. In this collage, the poem itself becomes an “archive of silence.”

其二，是典故的組合方式。《默》里出現的伏生、綠珠、姮娥、乾戚、金人、百家，各自來自十分不同的歷史與神話語境。詩人沒有按朝代排列，也沒有做單一指涉，而是像蒙太奇一樣，把不同時間線上的“沈默時刻”剪輯在一起：有為保書而藏的老者，有墜樓的歌伎，有被緘口的金人。這種拼貼，讓詩本身像一部“沈默檔案”。

Third, its value judgments are restrained yet unmistakable. Classical poetry is often known as a form of literary expressionism in which “present lamentations are evoked by mourning the past” 傷今吊古. Scenes of bygone times are used to comment on contemporary circumstances. The poem Silence, however, extends the logic of “silence” one step further. “The speaker does not die / the speaker is guilty” 言者不死 / 言者之罪 is a pointed reference to the present. The poem inherits the traditional sense that verse may “express the will” 詩言志, but it avoids slogan-like language, letting quiet four-syllable lines offer their subtle judgment. This approach is more powerful than direct appeals to the concepts of “justice” or “courage” and as a result will better withstand the passage of time.

其三，是價值判斷的含蓄但明確。古典詩歌常用“傷今吊古”，用過去影射現在；《默》則把“默”的邏輯講得更直白。“言者不死 / 言者之罪”已經是對時代直接的反諷。它既繼承了傳統中“詩言志”的功能，又繞開口號式語言，用平靜的四字句把判斷壓在意象之中。這種寫法，比直接寫“正義”“勇氣”要更有力量，也更經得起時間。

Linking the images together, a clear axis appears. First comes the compliant “mild-mannered people / yes-yes multitudes.” Then the cognitive distortion of “what is seen is not seen / what ears hear is not real.” Next comes the cold onlooking of “Green Pearl falls from the tower / who in the Music Office asks?” Then the locking down of knowledge and speech in “Fu Sheng without disciples / bronze statues with sealed-up mouths / the Hundred Schools are all dismissed.” The poem ends with the total loss of voice: “orioles and swallows now mute.”

In terms of structure alone, the poem virtually sketches a outline of a “national history of silence”: from style to space, from individual fates to mythic metaphors, from the breaking of scholarly lineages to the trial of words, ending in an all-encompassing quiet. In form it uses the neatness and repetition of archaic verse; in content it plainly writes about the current climate. The poem does not describe the tragedy of one or two people. It traces the process by which a society “learns not to speak.” The meaning of “silence” has several layers:

• On the psychological level, people stay quiet out of fear, self-protection, and exhaustion — “Mild-mannered, courteous folk” 温温恭人, “ ‘Yes, yes,’ says the common herd” 諾諾群生 who simply do not want trouble;
• On the cognitive level, once “what is seen is not seen / what is heard is not heard” 所見非見 / 所聞非聞becomes normal, people themselves can no longer tell what is true;
• On the institutional level, “bronze men with sealed mouths / the Hundred Schools all dismissed” 金人緘口 / 百家乃黜 demonstrates that the avenues for speaking out are systematically blocked; and,
• On the ethical level, when “the speaker is adjudged to be guilty” 言者之罪 by the system then social values have been turned on their head and speaking out becomes a moral risk.

Follow this line far enough and “silence” 默 becomes “sinking” 沉. People are not simply living quietly; they are are on a collective slow downward slide. Liu Yu 劉瑜 has written that “silence is equivalent to surrender” 沉默即投降. Jian Li’s Silence goes further: it not only addresses “capitulation” 投降, it is also about “obliteration” [or erasure] 滅亡. The hidden logic is this: once a community learns to treat silence as a basic reflex necessary to vouchsafe safety, the forces that are corroding its institutions meet almost no resistance. Liu Yu’s phrase “silence is surrender” marks the political side of the paradox; Jian Li is even more concerned with how it leads to “annihilation” [or self-abnegation].

[The popular essayist] Wang Xiaobo’s 王小波 phrase “the silent majority” stresses the crushing number of those pushed into silence. Silence is more concerned with where silence puts them in ethical terms. Jian Li’s poem punctures a familiar conceit: the belief that “not taking sides” is a safe option. Once the posture of “neutrality” becomes common, it forms a historical track, a path dependency, that one can trace. The poem’s focus is not on whether heroes appear, but on how the many watch events unfold as mute spectators. That shift makes the poem more than an outpouring of feeling. It offers rather a lucid diagnosis of an all-pervasive structure.

Note: On Wang Xiaobo, see The Silent Majority and the Great Majority. For Liu Yu 劉瑜, a prominent liberal academic, see ‘Silence isn’t golden, it’s a social tragedy’ 沈默不是金，而是社會的悲劇, 2016.

Escaping the deepest pit in hell

Today many people like to justify silence as being a form of “adult rationality.” Talk less, do more. Avoid trouble; that is the wisest lifestyle 少說話，多做事；不惹麻煩，是一種生活智慧. Faced with incidents of public concern, people say, “observe, do not react”看一看就好, “don’t repost, don’t comment, don’t click” 不轉，不評，不點. Over time, the only things that remain in the public sphere are with advertising, entertainment and safe speech. The lines “Mild-mannered, courteous folk, / ‘Yes, yes,’ says the common herd” 溫溫恭人 / 諾諾群生 no longer sound like a quotation from an ancient text; they describe the everyday landscape of Chinese social media.

Liu Yu’s line “silence is surrender” pushes this paradox from ethics into politics: not speaking is already a form of assent; assent is a passive tilt in one direction (Liu). Wang Xiaobo, in writing about “the silent majority”, describes how this particular era squeezes people into the position of silence. Wang cares about the numerical reality of the silent majority. Silence cares about the ethical position of the silent. The poem exposes a common form of self-consolation: the notion that staying “neutral” will vouchsafe the individual personal safety and a state of innocence. When, however, the stance of neutrality becomes a generally accepted posture, it takes on the form of a discernible historical trajectory.

‘The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality’ is an oft-quoted line, that is usually [and mistakenly] attributed to Dante. The sentence speaks to personal ethical choice and to the deepest abyss into which the individual soul may sink. In Silence Jian Li talks about how a community gradually sinks into the mire. The poem traces the very nature of silence and the way in which it drags a community downward. In plain terms: stay silent long enough, and you too will sink. Not just one person, but an entire city, an entire land. Here the focus is not on the appearance of heroes. It is on the role of the many. This shift in focus turns the poem from an emotional cry into a dispassionate analysis.

Note: In the Inferno, Dante writes:

“Master [Virgil], what is it that I hear? Who are
those people so defeated by their pain?”

And he to me: “This miserable way
is taken by the sorry souls of those
who lived without disgrace and without praise.

They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.

The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them –
even the wicked cannot glory in them.”

The poem strikes a chord not only because it is carefully crafted, but because it flips the daily stance of many people on its head. When “what is seen is not seen / what ears hear is not real” becomes routine, silence is no longer merely an act of self-protection. It raises the cost-effectiveness of evil itself. For those who wield violence, the cost falls. For those who speak, the price rises. The process from silence to sinking is completed incrementally — from mind, to opinion, to institutions and finally into a historical trend that is hard to reverse.

Silence does not simply tell a story about “standing up”, nor does it promise a happy ending. Rather it limns the shape of silence itself and its politesse, as well as its indifference; the systematizing inertia of silence and the mechanisms that punish speech, as well as the hollowness that remains after silence settles in. Once “Mild-mannered, courteous folk” 温温恭人, “ ‘Yes, yes,’ says the common herd” 諾諾群生 becomes the default position for a society, a larger tragedy is already unfolding. The deepest layer of hell does not need flames to achieve its agonisingly destructive ends. In fact, it may look like “the clear pool that does not stir” 清波不動, “deep woods that are silent” 長林無聲, a “cold pond where the croaking of frogs is heard” 寒池聽蛙, a place where “orioles and swallows who once sang are quiet, gone” 鶯燕喑啞.

What Silence does is to forge a chain of causation — “silence → tacit consent → indulgence → sinking” — offering it to the reader mind in the form of archaic verse. It reminds readers that although silence might look like a form of inaction, quiescence itself plays a role in shaping the course of events. When individual “silences” harden into a collective habit, they nudge society as a whole towards “sinking”. Perhaps what matters now is not that everyone can or should become a hero, but that people should at least recognize which link they occupy in that chain of causation. Are they living in the numbness of “what is seen is not seen / what is heard is not heard”? Are they only “exchanging glances at the crossroads” 通衢以目 and leaving their resistance at that? Or do they applaud as “Green Pearl falls from the tower” 綠珠墜樓. Perhaps they might even wonder, “who in the music bureau pursues an inquiry?” 教坊誰問？Silence may offer no answers but it does offer a translucent mirror. Whoever dares to look into it has already taken a step off the track that invariably leads to submersion.

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Source:

• Ren Jingjing, “A National History of Ruin” Beneath Universal Silence — reading Jian Li’s poem Silence 默, China Thought Express, 21 March 2026. For the original Chinese text, see 任晶晶，舉世緘默下的“國家沈淪史”——讀漸離《默》，《中國思想快遞》，2026年3月21日. The editor of China Heritage has reworked the machine-aided translation of Ren Jingjing’s article extensively. Notes and explications have also been added and Chinese characters converted from 殘體字 to 正體字.

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