How Overseas Chinese Can Step Out of Truman’s World — Five Reflections on Intellectual Freedom -IG05

Leaving China does not necessarily mean leaving behind the habits of thought formed there. Inspired by The Truman Show, Fang Tianliang explores five questions about freedom of expression, childhood political oaths, historical responsibility, the distinction between China and the Chinese Communist Party, and the courage to think independently.

How Overseas Chinese Can Walk Out of The Truman Show

Fang Tianliang

Inner Growth |Reflections on Civilization

 

Prologue: We Grew Up Inside the Studio

1. A Film from 1998

In 1998, an American film was released called The Truman Show. Its protagonist, Truman, is an ordinary insurance salesman. He has a wife, friends, a job, and every day he lives a calm and happy life. Every morning when he leaves the house, he greets his neighbours: "Good morning! And in case I don't see ya — good afternoon, good evening, and good night!"

That line is interesting. If you listen carefully, it is actually a slogan, a greeting written into a script. Truman says it every day, sincerely and naturally, the way we say "Have you eaten?" every morning. But Truman doesn't know that the entire world he lives in is a vast television set. The sky is fake, the ocean is fake, the sun and moon are manufactured. His wife is an actress, his best friend is an actor, and even the strangers who pass him on the street are all performing from a script. Only Truman doesn't know.

What is more astonishing is that nobody has to hold a gun to Truman's head each day to make him obey. He grew up here. He believes what he sees, and he assumes the world he lives in has simply always been this way.

To me, the film's deepest insight is not about overt force. It is about the power of a world that has always seemed normal.

Then one day, a studio light that should have been hanging in the "sky" falls to the ground. Truman begins to suspect. Later he notices that the cars on the street always seem to drive the same fixed routes; that his wife sometimes talks as if she is reciting a commercial; that whenever he tries to leave the town, obstacles appear. A flight is cancelled. A car won't start. The ferry is out of service. Each excuse is so reasonable that you cannot argue with it.

Finally, he decides to sail out to sea. The boat travels a long way, and suddenly strikes a wall. Truman reaches out and touches that blue "sky."

So the world he had lived in for decades really did have a boundary. The real world lay beyond it.

At the end of the film, Truman stands before the exit. The director who has controlled his life for decades speaks to him from the sky: the world outside is full of deception and danger, while inside the studio there is safety, order, everything familiar. Truman listens, smiles faintly — and walks out the door. The film ends.

2. A Question I Have Never Stopped Asking

But I have kept thinking about one question: if Truman's body has walked out of the studio while his mind is still in there, is he really free?

This is not a literary question. It is a practical one.

Let me describe a scene I have heard about. In Vancouver, a gathering of Chinese friends — five or six families, children running around, a hot pot steaming on the table. Someone at the table starts talking about China's economy, about housing prices, about children's education. The mood is lively. Then the conversation turns somewhere more sensitive — someone mentions a detained lawyer, or a period of history.

You can see the moment happen. Almost everyone pauses at the same instant. Someone looks down and picks up food. Someone gets up to fetch a drink. Someone quickly steers the topic back to "but honestly, life in China is quite convenient now." The temperature of the whole room drops in a single second.

Everyone at that table has been abroad for more than ten years. All of them hold Canadian passports or permanent residence. In Canada, criticising any government is entirely legal — nobody will be taken away for what they say. Yet their bodies produced a reaction that required no thought, no weighing up, as fast as a knee reflex.

This is what internalised self-censorship looks like.

When we emigrate, we can take our luggage, our savings, our degrees, our work experience. But we also pack up our habits of thought and bring them along. Among those habits are things worth treasuring — diligence, thrift, respect for education, respect for elders. Those are genuinely good parts of Chinese culture and we should keep them. But there may also be some ideas that need to be taken out and re-examined.

3. The Five Questions We Will Discuss Today

Many of us left China ten, twenty years ago, or more. We crossed the geographical wall. But did the wall in our minds come out with us?

Today we will take this up in three parts.

The first part is about how the wall gets built. Why does a person who is already safe still not dare to speak?

The second part is about the right hands we raised. What exactly did we agree to when we were seven? And what should an ordinary person do when history makes a mistake?

The third part is about separating concepts that have been tangled together. Are China and the Chinese Communist Party the same thing? What does it actually mean to leave an organisation? And once you have walked out of the studio, how do you avoid walking into another one?

Let's start with the first question.

 

Part One: How the Wall Gets Built

 

Chapter 1: Why Do Some People Still Not Dare to Speak?

Let me begin with a simple question. Suppose you have lived abroad for ten or twenty years. Do you dare to criticise the Chinese Communist Party publicly, on social media, under your real name?

Some will say: Of course I do — that is my freedom of speech. Others will say: I would rather not.

Why not? Some worry about relatives back home. Ten or twenty years ago this may have seemed remote, but in recent years it has become clearer — if your comments abroad are noticed, your parents in China may receive phone calls, may be "visited," may be summoned for a talk; a child's visa may be delayed; when you go back you may be "invited for tea," or you may not be allowed to leave. Those worries have a real basis. They should not be dismissed as cowardice.

But there is another situation. It is the one in the title of this chapter: when the external environment has already changed, the habits a person formed in the past do not necessarily change at the same time.

1. Three Famous Experiments: Obedience, Conformity, and Silence

Psychological research offers several ways to understand why people obey, conform, or remain silent.

The first experiment is Milgram's obedience experiment.

In 1961, a psychologist at Yale University named Stanley Milgram ran an experiment that would be almost impossible to get past an ethics board today. He recruited ordinary members of the public and told them they were taking part in a study on "learning and memory." The participant played the "teacher"; in the next room was a "learner." The teacher read out word pairs; the learner had to remember them. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher had to press a switch and give him an electric shock.

The voltage started at 15 volts and rose in 15-volt steps, all the way to 450 volts. The switches carried labels: "Slight Shock," "Moderate Shock," "Strong Shock," "Danger: Severe Shock." The last two switches carried no words at all — just three X's: XXX.

Of course, nobody was actually being shocked in the next room. The "learner" was an actor. He would bang on the wall, shout, cry out in pain, and eventually fall silent.

When the teacher hesitated and wanted to stop, an experimenter in a white coat would give four prods, in order:

The first: "Please continue."

The second: "The experiment requires that you continue."

The third: "It is absolutely essential that you continue."

The fourth: "You have no other choice. You must go on."

That was all. Milgram had expected that only a few percent of people would go all the way to 450 volts, because doing so would be unthinkable, would be evil. In the first round, 26 of 40 participants — 65 percent — went all the way to the maximum.

Who were these people? Not Nazis, not thugs. Ordinary citizens of New Haven: teachers, engineers, salespeople, factory workers. They sweated, they trembled, they laughed nervously, some were close to collapse. And still they pressed the switch.

Milgram later wrote something important: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.

The second experiment is Asch's conformity experiment.

In 1951, Solomon Asch ran a much simpler set of experiments. He showed participants two lines and asked which one matched the length of a reference line. The answer was so obvious that nobody could get it wrong. But the participant was seated in a room where the first few people were planted confederates, and they all deliberately gave the same wrong answer.

About a third of the real participants went along with the group's clearly incorrect answer on the critical trials. Across a series of trials, roughly three-quarters of participants conformed at least once.

Asch's finding tells us: people do not only obey authority — people also obey the majority. Even when the majority is plainly wrong, even when the answer is right in front of them, people will doubt their own eyes.

The third example is not an experiment but a theory: the "spiral of silence."

In 1974, the German communication scholar Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann proposed a concept called the "spiral of silence." While studying a West German election, she noticed something strange: if a person believes his opinion is in the minority, he is unwilling to state it publicly; by not speaking, the minority becomes smaller; as the minority becomes smaller, he is even less willing to speak.

Round and round the spiral turns, until a group that may have been quite large simply disappears from public space, as if it had never existed.

Look at what those three experiments say together.

Milgram says: when someone else is in charge, we can stop being responsible.

Asch says: when everyone else says so, I can doubt my own eyes.

Noelle-Neumann says: when I don't know whether I'm in the majority, I choose silence.

Add those three together and you have a self-censorship machine. Note that this machine needs no prison. It only needs a set of habits established in childhood: obey authority, follow the majority, stay silent when uncertain.

 

2. How Self-Censorship Becomes a Habit

Now let me put that machine back into our own experience.

If a person is told again and again from childhood that certain questions cannot be discussed, certain periods of history cannot be mentioned, certain figures cannot be criticised, then self-censorship can become a habit. Even after nobody is forbidding it any more, he will still instinctively avoid it.

Have you noticed this movement? In a WeChat group, you type out a whole paragraph, look at it, and delete it. Or you write half a post on Moments and change it into a scenery photo. Or you like a message and then, a while later, un-like it.

How many times do these small movements add up to across a life? Nobody can count them. But they all share one feature: they happen before anyone else sees. The censorship has not happened yet; you have performed it on its behalf.

That is what internalisation means. It is not someone outside the wall pointing a gun at you. It is that you, inside the wall, have learned not to look in that direction at all.

So the question truly worth asking is not "Why don't you speak?" It is: "Is my silence today a decision I reached after thinking, or is it that fear and habit formed in the past mean I never even realised I could speak?"

There is a large difference between those two. The first is a choice. The second means the environment of the past may still be shaping who we are today.

Let me give an example. Suppose a Chinese friend has lived in Australia for eighteen years. At work he is outspoken; he will push back on his boss, he will criticise the Australian government on climate policy, on immigration, on tax. He says what he thinks.

But one day the conversation at a friends' gathering turns to China, and he goes quiet. It isn't that he disagrees — he has plenty of views. He may even say, "Well, life in China is pretty good these days." Ask him why, and he says, "No particular reason. I just… don't want to get into it."

Does this person have freedom? Legally, yes. Psychologically, no. Because in that room inside his head, an experimenter in a white coat is still standing there, ready at any moment to say: "Please continue. It is essential that you continue. This is your responsibility."

 

3. A More Hidden Trap: Mistaking the Past for Yourself

I need to say something here that may sting a little.

Much silence is not caused by fear. It is caused by an unwillingness to admit that you once believed something that was wrong.

This is a deep psychological mechanism. Once a person has invested many years in a position, that position becomes part of the self. To admit it was wrong is to admit that for decades you were a fool. Nobody wants to do that. So we would rather defend it, and even argue for it — not because the evidence supports it, but because we have staked part of ourselves on it.

There is a term for this: sunk cost. The more you have invested in something, the less willing you are to admit it was a mistake.

Picture someone who has lived abroad for twenty years. In his youth he believed many things, made many choices, and may once have said with pride, "China is different now." Today, if new information tells him that something he firmly believed is not actually true, his first reaction may not be "Let me look again," but "What's your angle here?"

Such a reaction may be less about intelligence than about protecting a long-held sense of self.

But the way out lies exactly here: examining your past beliefs is not a repudiation of your life. It is separating the facts from the self.

You can say to yourself: "I had limited information back then. I made the best judgement I could under those conditions. Now I know more, so I am updating it. This is not betrayal. This is growing up."

Like Truman. Discovering that the sky in the studio is fake does not mean everything else was fake. His feelings may have been real. His kindness was real. His wife may have been an actress, but those decades of a way of life, the people he cared about, the road he walked every day — those experiences were real. What he needs to do is not throw the whole past away, but re-sort it: which parts are real? Which parts were arranged for him?

 

4. A Small Self-Examination Checklist

If you are willing, take a pen and work through the following questions. You don't have to show anyone. This is only for you.

First, on speaking. Over the past year, has there been a case where you had a clear judgement about something in your mind, but you deliberately chose not to say it — and when you chose not to say it, did you know whether that was strategy or habit?

Strategy is fine. To protect family in China, you may choose not to speak in certain settings. That is rational and understandable. But the difference between strategy and habit is this: strategy means you have chosen and you know you have chosen; habit means you never even noticed there was a choice.

Second, on information. Where does the Chinese-language news you read every day mainly come from? Do you have at least two or three sources whose positions are visibly different from one another? If all your information comes from one direction, you cannot test any of your judgements.

Third, on your body. The next time that familiar pause falls over the dinner table, notice your own body. Has your heartbeat quickened? Do you feel like doing something else with your hands? Where does that reaction come from? What is it telling you?

Fourth, on the real size of the fear. If I said it today, what is the worst that could happen? Can that worst case be made concrete? For example: what specific thing would I lose? If I would lose nothing at all, then what exactly am I afraid of?

Writing a fear down may make it easier to distinguish a concrete risk from a reflexive expectation.

 

5. Freedom Is Not a Status. It Is a Practice.

Finally, let me clear up a misunderstanding. Some people assume that emigration means freedom — that once you have a passport, your mind is automatically free.

It isn't. Freedom is not a piece of paper, not a status, not the colour of a passport. Freedom is a capacity that has to be practised every day.

Practise it once today. Read an article from a position you are not used to, and don't immediately judge it as "suspect." Listen to someone with an opposing view all the way to the end without interrupting. Or take a sentence you have thought about for a long time and post it in a group for the first time, and see whether the world collapses.

You will find that the world usually does not.

That is the first step out of Truman's world. It is not a heroic act. It is simply turning an automatic movement into a decision you make yourself.

 

Chapter 2: The Body Emigrates, Does the Mind?

Having answered the first question, I want to go into it more closely. Because "how the wall gets built" actually has three layers: the wall built by the system, the wall built by society, and the wall you build inside yourself. Let's take them one at a time.

 

1. Three Layers of Wall

The outermost layer is built by the system. It is the firewall, the censorship, the "sensitive words," the systematic removal of a topic from public space. This layer is the most visible and the easiest to identify. You cannot reach certain websites at home; what you post gets deleted. That is the outside layer.

The middle layer is built by society. It is human relations, connections, "everyone does it this way," "don't make trouble for me." This layer needs no police. It is maintained by neighbours, colleagues, relatives, group admins, old classmates. If you post something you shouldn't in a WeChat group and someone gets removed, it may not be you — it may be the group admin. So everyone learns to police himself, and to police everyone else.

The innermost layer is built by you. This is the hardest to see, because it has already become part of your character.

Emigration only dismantles the outermost layer. The second and third layers came over with the suitcase.

Have you ever noticed that a person's social media feed often becomes more orthodox after moving abroad? In China he would grumble a little; abroad he suddenly posts the most fervent articles every day. Why? Because away from that environment what he needs is no longer information. It is belonging. He uses positions to prove "I am still one of us."

That is the third layer at work. It is not protecting anything. It is protecting him from loneliness.

 

2. Three Immigrants

Let me tell you about three people. They are invented, but you should be able to recognise someone in each of them.

The first — I'll call him Old Chen. He left in 1979 and died in 2020.

Old Chen was from Guangdong. In 1979 he crossed the border, then reached Hong Kong, then eventually America. He worked in restaurants, laundries, a grocery store. He never once discussed politics. Not once. There was a television in his house and he only watched the French news channel — because he couldn't understand it, so he never had to form a judgement.

Old Chen was not without opinions. He had them. But every act of "taking a stand" in his lifetime could have changed his fate. During the land reform of the 1950s his family's class status was assigned. In the campaigns of the 1960s and 70s he watched neighbours dragged out to be struggled against. He chose to run because he had done the arithmetic — not the arithmetic of ideology, but the arithmetic of whether there would be food.

So Old Chen's silence was not cowardice. It was a survival skill. In the environment he survived, silence had saved his life. He treated it as a treasure and brought it to America. Before he died he said one thing to his grandson: "Out there, say less, do more."

That sentence is half right. Saying less is sometimes right. But a survival skill forged in blood does not know when it has expired. It keeps working in safe places.

The second — I'll call her Grace. She left in 1996 and is now an engineer in Toronto.

Grace belonged to the wave that went abroad for graduate school. She worked hard, earned her degree, joined a large company, and did very well. She is also the type I most want to talk about, because her wall is the least visible.

At work, Grace is extremely willing to speak up. She will push back on a manager directly. She will argue about a technical proposal for half an hour. Among her team, she is one of the most outspoken people.

But the moment the subject turns to China, Grace changes. She becomes immediately "balanced": "It depends on your angle." "We're not there, it's hard to judge." "Every country has its own national conditions."

On one occasion she noticed it herself. She said something that has stayed with me: "I don't know why. I can get into an argument about anything, but on this one subject, my instinct is to play mediator."

That is internalisation. Her body knows which territory requires caution — ahead of her conscious mind.

And here is something worth noting: the higher a person's social standing, the more likely he is to defend that wall. Because he has more need to maintain "respectability" in his professional circle, more need to prove to colleagues "I'm not one of those extremists." So he learns another skill: wrapping silence in the language of objectivity.

That is not hypocrisy. It is the most refined form of the third layer of wall. It no longer presents itself as fear. It presents itself as maturity.

The third — I'll call him Xiao Lin. He left in 2015 and is now doing a PhD in Germany.

Xiao Lin is a "new emigrant." He flew out with a scholarship. He has almost no awareness of the wall. He feels completely free, and can even find it irritating that overseas Chinese complain about China all the time — "ungrateful," he thinks.

But something changed him last year. A German classmate was preparing a presentation about China and asked him a very specific question — not about politics, about a set of figures. Xiao Lin found that his first instinct was to go and look up the authoritative version, and that he took it to be the fact. It never occurred to him that other versions existed.

That night, Xiao Lin realised something uncomfortable for the first time: nobody had been deceiving him. It was that he had never once asked whether there were other accounts.

He had no wall. He had an entire room with no windows — and he was very comfortable in it.

These three represent three forms. Old Chen is the fearful type: he experienced real danger. Grace is the respectability type: she protects herself with "objectivity." Xiao Lin is the comfortable type: it never occurred to him to go outside.

I tell you about these three to make one point: the wall does not need you to fear it. It only needs you not to touch it. For Old Chen it uses fear; for Grace it uses respectability; for Xiao Lin it uses comfort. Different methods, identical effect.

 

3. Language Travels With You

Here is a very concrete detail that is rarely discussed: language.

Many people have had this experience. A sentence is easy to say in Chinese; say the same sentence in English and your face goes red. Or the reverse: you can discuss a subject easily in English, but in Chinese it won't come out.

Why does this happen? Because language is not a neutral container. Language carries an entire set of judgements built into it, an entire set of assumptions about "what counts as a normal thing to say."

What you learned in Chinese as a child was not only vocabulary. You also learned what is polite and what is rude; what will be praised if you say it and what will be condemned. Those judgements are now bound up with the language itself.

So a statement that is perfectly normal in English — "I think my government got this wrong, and it damaged the country's interests" — may sound, when rendered in Chinese, almost like hostility. Because the audience has changed. The audience you have internalised is still the one that would punish you for saying it.

This explains a curious phenomenon: many people are free abroad and unfree the moment they step back into a Chinese-language setting. Because what they have changed back is not only the language, but the whole set of social relations.

So sometimes walking out of The Truman Show is a very concrete act. It may simply be: for the first time, you calmly say a sentence in Chinese that you have never dared to say, and afterwards you notice you said it quite clearly. That is how the wall of language comes down — one brick at a time.

 

4. An Exercise: Write the Fear Down

If you take only one thing from this first part, I hope it is this: write the fear down.

Here is how. Find the three things you would least dare to say in public, and write them on paper. Then, for each one, answer four questions:

First, what is this sentence actually saying? Write it precisely. Don't write "that thing" or "those people." Use concrete nouns and facts.

Second, if I said it, what would happen? Write it out, item by item. Would I lose my job? Would I lose friends? Would it affect family in China? If so, what kind of effect exactly? Is there a way to reduce that effect?

Third, what is the basis for my prediction that this would happen? Have I seen someone get into trouble for something similar? Or do I just feel that it "probably would"? Those two are very different.

Fourth, if I did nothing, how would I think about this five years from now?

Most people who do this exercise discover two interesting things. First, their fear is actually made up of three or four very specific items, not one unnameable black cloud. Second, of those three or four items, two are not real consequences at all — they are imagined versions of real consequences.

Making a fear specific can help us judge it more carefully; leaving it vague can make it harder to question.

That is one practical step towards dismantling the wall within.

 

 

Part Two: Those Right Hands We Raised

 

Chapter 3: The Right Hand I Raised at Seven — What Did I Agree To?

If you grew up in mainland China, you probably remember the day you put on the red scarf in primary school.

The teacher led the children out to the playground. Everyone put on a red scarf, faced the Young Pioneers flag, raised the right hand, and repeated after the teacher: "Love the Chinese Communist Party, love the motherland, love the people… Be ready: to contribute our strength to the cause of communism!"

I want you to recall that scene. The sun was good. There may have been a breeze. The flag fluttered in front. Several hundred children raised their hands at once. The teacher's tone was solemn. The music was stirring. You were seven. You stood very straight. You were earnest — you may even have been a little proud, because plenty of children had not been given a red scarf yet.

In that moment there was something in you that is hard to describe: a feeling of being recognised. That feeling was real, and I am not going to deny it. It is a warm childhood memory for many people, and even now it still stirs something.

But if we change the angle and ask a different question, another problem appears.

 

1. Did a Seven-Year-Old Understand What He Was Promising?

Most of those children were seven or eight years old. Did they know what communism meant? Did they know the difference between socialism and capitalism? Did they know the difference between a party and a state? Did they know what "love" and "support" mean, morally and legally? Most of them, probably, did not.

But they had already raised their hands and spoken a political oath.

I want to add a finer observation here. This is not simply a case of children not understanding. It is a deliberate procedure.

Do you remember? Before joining, you had to write an application, memorise the oath, practise the gesture, discuss the meaning of the Young Pioneers salute. The whole ceremony had a particular design: it wrapped heavy content in light form.

The red scarf is beautiful. The song is cheerful. The salute is solemn. A child can fully experience all of that. But the words of the oath, a child cannot understand. "Contribute our strength to the cause of communism" — what a seven-year-old hears in that sentence is not political theory. What he hears is "I must work hard, I must be worthy of this red scarf."

And that is exactly the point. Years later, very few people can recall the actual wording of the oath. But many recall a feeling: I already belong.

What I want to discuss is not whether a seven-year-old was right or wrong at the time. It is a more basic question: how should we understand a promise made by someone who did not understand what he was promising?

 

2. What an Oath Means in Human Civilisation

To answer that, we first have to understand the thing called an oath.

In human civilisation, an oath has never been an ordinary sentence.

In a courtroom, a witness swears to tell the truth. At a wedding, two people make promises to each other. Soldiers and public officials may swear an oath before taking up their duties. In religion, the vows of clergy may be lifelong.

These oaths differ in nature, but they share one feature: the person making the promise should know what he is promising.

Let's see how the law deals with this.

Modern law has a basic concept: legal capacity. Roughly, a person must reach a certain age before he can independently enter into a valid legal act. Why? Because the law recognises that below that age, a person cannot genuinely understand the consequences of his actions.

Contract law also recognises circumstances in which consent is defective, although the legal consequences depend on the jurisdiction and facts. A childhood political oath is not a contract, but it still raises a moral question about understanding and voluntary commitment.

Of course, a Young Pioneers oath is not a legal contract. No court will hear the case. But morally, we can ask the same kind of question: why should a political identity acquired in childhood determine a person's thinking as an adult?

Let me offer two points of comparison.

The Soviet Young Pioneers. After the 1917 revolution, the Soviet Union had the Young Pioneers — the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organisation — and the Communist Youth League, the Komsomol. Children joined the Pioneers at around ten, the Komsomol at fourteen, the Party as adults. Almost identical to our arrangement. After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, those organisations vanished. Tens of millions of people had joined them at some point, and then one day the organisation no longer existed. So what happened to those tens of millions of oaths? Nobody pursued them. Nobody could. Because everyone understood: that was an organisation's ceremony, not a person's conviction.

East Germany's Free German Youth. East Germany had a youth organisation called the Free German Youth, FDJ in German. It was an almost universal membership organisation, from primary school to university. Joining involved an oath and a ceremony. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell; in 1990 Germany reunified; the organisation dissolved. German sources from the period make clear that for the great majority, joining was simply what everyone did. It was not an individual decision. It was a collective process.

I am not raising these two examples to say "so it was all fake, so it doesn't matter." Quite the opposite. They matter — and precisely because they matter, a person should have the chance to answer the question again, as an adult: what did I mean by that?

What matters is not whether those words had legal force. What matters is that a person may reach today without ever having been given the chance to answer that question again with an adult's understanding.

 

3. From Obedience to Understanding: How a Person Grows Up

Now back to ourselves.

We received a great deal of education as children. Some of it is worth keeping for life: be filial to your parents, be honest, be diligent, "do not impose on others what you would not want imposed on yourself." That is not politics. That is civilisation. It does not expire when politics changes.

But some of our understandings will change as knowledge and experience accumulate. Political views should be no exception.

A healthy life should look something like this:

At seven, we accept other people's answers.

At seventeen, we begin to doubt those answers.

At thirty-seven, we have our own answers — and we know where their limits are.

The key to this path is not "rebellion." It is that the way we understand has changed. At seven we believed because the teacher said so. An adult's belief should look different: you should be able to say why you believe it, you should know what evidence would change your mind, and you should understand why others do not believe it.

So we can ask ourselves four questions again:

First, is my understanding of a political organisation today derived from the education I received as a child, or from what I have learned about the facts as an adult?

Second, have I read sources from different positions? Note: read. Not seen a headline. Not seen a screenshot someone forwarded. Not heard someone's summary of a book. Have I actually read the book?

Third, can I distinguish how an organisation describes itself from what it has actually done in history? These two things are often different — for every organisation.

Fourth, if I were choosing today for the first time, would I still make the same choice? If the answer is yes, then give yourself a reason — not "everyone does," but because you have thought it through. A "yes" like that carries weight.

At seven, we learned what other people told us the world was like. As adults, we should learn to judge for ourselves what the world is actually like.

 

4. Why This Is So Hard

I want to be honest: for many people this is very hard, harder than it looks.

Because when you say "I want to re-examine this," you are actually facing a more painful question: what about my memories?

For many people, the best memories of childhood are bound up with those collective activities. The spring outing, the singing competition, the group dance, the march at the sports day. You were happy then. Your teachers were good. Your classmates were lovely.

If you now tell me part of that system was wrong, my first reaction may be: then what were my happy moments? What was that good teacher?

My answer is: they are all still there.

A person can have a genuine childhood inside an imperfect system. Your happiness was real. Your teacher may simply have been a good teacher, who did what he could within that environment. You can say two things at once: "that memory is warm," and "that system had problems."

That is a capacity only adults have: to hold two complicated things at once without letting either cancel the other.

When Truman finally walked out that door, he did not hate the actors. He could even have been grateful to people who genuinely cared for him and who grew up inside the script. What he was leaving was not a person. It was an arranged world.

 

Chapter 4: What Should Ordinary People Do When History Makes a Mistake?

Now let's turn our eyes from China to Europe.

The topic of this chapter looks far from us, but it is actually the closest to us. Because the question it asks is not "what did the bad people do." It is: when a system begins to do evil, what did I — an ordinary person — do?

 

1. Germany in 1945

In 1945, the Second World War ended. Nazi Germany was defeated. Berlin lay in ruins.

German society faced an extraordinarily difficult question: how do you face your past?

At Nuremberg, the leading Nazi war criminals were tried by an international military tribunal. At the same time, the Allies pushed denazification. But German society was not only Hitler and a handful of Nazi officials. There were countless civil servants, teachers, company employees, soldiers, and ordinary people.

Some participated actively. Some resisted. Some chose silence. And many told themselves: "I was only following orders." "I was only doing my job." "I didn't make the policy."

Should all of these people bear identical responsibility?

Of course not. Criminal responsibility must be determined case by case, on the basis of each person's specific acts and the evidence. A person cannot bear individual responsibility for every crime of a country merely because he was born in it.

But beyond legal responsibility there is another question: when a society moves toward catastrophe, what role did ordinary people play in it?

 

2. Jaspers: Four Kinds of Guilt

The German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote a book after the war called The Question of German Guilt. In 1946 he lectured at Heidelberg, and the lectures became the book. In it he drew a very useful distinction.

He divided German responsibility into four levels.

The first is criminal guilt. This is the legal level. If a person actually took part in a crime, he must face a court. This can be established by the state, with evidence and procedure.

The second is political guilt. Jaspers's point is that as citizens, we all bear the consequences of what our country does. Regardless of whether they participated in specific crimes, Germans were citizens of that country, and so all of them bore the political consequences of what that country did — partition, occupation, being shunned by the world. That is not a moral accusation. It is a political fact.

The third is moral guilt. This is what an individual has to face in his own conscience. Did you stand by? Did you fail to resist when you could have? This is settled only between you and your conscience. There is no court, no verdict.

The fourth is metaphysical guilt. This is the hardest to describe. Jaspers said that as long as I am alive while another human being was killed, something irreparable remains in my existence. This is not a charge. It is a kind of existential debt.

Why draw the lines so finely?

Because most arguments about history die of conceptual confusion.

Someone says: "My grandfather did nothing wrong." True. He may bear no criminal guilt. But that does not mean he bears no political guilt, and it does not mean he has no moral questions to answer for himself.

Someone says: "You're punishing people for their family." No. Drawing distinctions is exactly how you avoid that. Once the distinctions are clear, we can say precisely who belongs in a courtroom and who needs to sit with something in his own mind.

 

3. Arendt: The Banality of Evil

Later, another thinker, Hannah Arendt, proposed a famous and much-disputed concept while studying the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann: "the banality of evil."

In 1961, Israel tried Eichmann in Jerusalem. He had been the Gestapo's officer for Jewish affairs, responsible for organising the deportation of Jews to the camps. Arendt attended the trial as a journalist and later wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem.

The Eichmann she saw was not what she had expected. She had expected a monster. What she saw was a middle-aged bureaucrat sitting in a glass box, verbose, quoting Kant at odd moments, insisting again and again that he had only followed orders. He spoke in clichés. He had no particular hatred. He was even unable to connect his work with its final result. He said he had never thought about what "the Final Solution" meant; he had merely handled timetables, transport arrangements, file numbers.

Arendt's warning was this: when a person stops making moral judgements about his own actions and is responsible only for following procedure and completing tasks, an ordinary person can become a cog in a vast machine of evil.

The phrase was widely disputed afterwards. Some criticised her for underestimating Eichmann's own initiative — later historical research did show that Eichmann was not merely "following orders"; he was zealous and inventive about making the operation more thorough.

That criticism is fair, and we should accept it. But Arendt's central question does not disappear because of it. What she asked was: why can "I was only doing my duty" be used by a person to discharge all moral responsibility?

That question remains valid today.

The historical circumstances are not interchangeable. Yet the language of evading responsibility—"I only handle this part," "I just follow procedure," "the decision came from above"—remains recognisable in many settings.

 

4. "Raise the Muzzle One Centimetre"

A phrase circulated later in German history: "raise the muzzle one centimetre."

There are many versions of the story. One common telling goes like this: after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, East German border guards were tried for shooting people who were trying to cross. In court, a guard's defence was: "I was only following orders. The law required it. If I hadn't done it, I would have violated my duty." The judge's answer, in substance, was: "The law gave you the right to shoot. The law did not require you to shoot to kill. You could have raised the muzzle one centimetre."

I have to be candid: the specific details of this story are not fully reliable across the many versions, and the exact sentence attributed to the judgment does not always correspond to the historical record. So I do not cite it as a rigorous historical document. I cite the idea behind it, because the idea is true, and it has appeared in the history of many countries.

What is that idea?

Even inside a vast system, can an ordinary person still leave his conscience one centimetre of room?

A superior orders you to shoot at a fleeing person. Perhaps you cannot change the entire system. But can you raise the muzzle a little, so that the person does not die?

That "one centimetre" looks very small. Sometimes it is the last distance between a person and his own conscience.

I should add something: that one centimetre is not an easy thing. I do not want to make it sound light.

If you were a young East German soldier, you had been trained in that system since eighteen; your worldview was given to you by that training; you believed you were guarding not a person but "the boundary of order." Every shot you fired, as you understood it, was duty. In that moment, to raise the muzzle one centimetre requires more than a bit of kindness. It requires having practised "judging for yourself" somewhere earlier, in advance, across a whole environment.

Which is to say: that one centimetre is not courage that appears suddenly in the critical moment. It is a habit built up little by little in ordinary times.

Have you practised stating your own judgement in unimportant settings? Have you, in some small matter, not gone along with what everyone was saying? Those practices look useless. But in the critical moment, they are the one centimetre.

 

5. How Other Countries Have Handled It: Germany, Japan, Spain

How a society faces its own past is something you can observe and compare. I'll give three contrasting cases — not to rank them, but to see more clearly where China stands today.

Germany: memory as state policy.

Postwar Germany took many years to walk a long road. In the 1950s German society, too, preferred silence. In many families, the grandparents' generation was a blank. The real turning point came around 1968, when a younger generation began to interrogate their parents: what did you do?

In December 1970, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt before the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The gesture was not choreographed, and it was not diplomatic protocol. He knelt to take on a piece of memory on behalf of a nation.

Later, Germany built the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in central Berlin, right beside the Reichstag: a field of concrete stelae, like a silent sea. German law prohibits public Holocaust denial. In German schools, the Nazi period is compulsory content; students face that history from an early age, and they face it repeatedly.

I want to stress one point: Germany did not start out this way. It took twenty or thirty years — from silence, to questioning, to taking it on. That process itself is a society growing up.

Japan: a process that was never completed.

Compared with Germany, Japan's postwar reckoning with war responsibility went far less far. The Tokyo Tribunal dealt with the principal war criminals, but the emperor system was retained, and many Class-A war criminal suspects soon returned to political life. Textbook language has been contested for decades. Class-A war criminals are enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine, and Japanese prime ministers' visits there have repeatedly provoked protests from neighbouring countries.

This is not a competition over whose crime was greater. What I want to point to is a structural observation: when a society does not complete its reckoning with the past, that past stays inside its present politics. It does not go away by itself. It reappears in territorial disputes, in textbook controversies, at every diplomatic occasion.

Spain: trading memory for a peaceful transition.

After the Spanish Civil War came Franco's dictatorship. When Franco died in 1975, Spain moved toward democracy. That process rested on a famous tacit agreement known as the "pact of forgetting": all sides agreed not to pursue crimes committed during the civil war and the dictatorship, in exchange for a peaceful transition.

At the time there was a case for this. It did help avoid another conflict. But decades later, Spanish society came back to it anyway. After 2000, ordinary people began excavating mass graves, looking for relatives killed in the civil war, and a "historical memory movement" emerged. In 2007 Spain passed the Historical Memory Law. In 2022 it passed a new Democratic Memory Law.

This tells us one thing: history does not disappear because you stop looking at it. It only comes back later — and by then the cost may be higher.

 

6. Back to Chinese History

If we turn now to modern and contemporary Chinese history, several periods deserve serious study: the severe famine of the Great Leap Forward, the political persecution of the Cultural Revolution, and the events of 1989.

People may hold different interpretations of these histories. But the difficulty of discussing them is not a reason to delete them from historical memory. On the Great Leap Forward's excess deaths, estimates by different researchers vary widely, from several million to tens of millions; that gap is itself a question that research should address, not something to be avoided. On the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party itself, in its 1981 Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China, characterised it as an "internal turmoil" that brought "severe disaster" to the Party, the country, and all its peoples — though that same document also set limits on how the discussion is framed. On 1989, open discussion is tightly restricted, and an entire generation's understanding of it comes from scattered materials, family memories, and conversations that were interrupted again and again.

I am not going to pronounce a verdict on these histories here, because that requires research, not emotion. What I want to say is something else:

Studying history is not about passing hatred on to later generations. It is about understanding how a tragedy actually happens.

And there is a crucial distinction here. Studying history can go in two directions: one asks who did it, the other asks why so many of us took part — or failed to stop it. The first direction easily becomes a reckoning, and easily becomes mutual accusation. The second is harder, but it comes closer to the truth, because it asks ordinary members of a society: under those conditions, why did we do what we did?

The point of that question is not to make everyone guilty. It is that only by asking it is there any chance the next time will be different.

 

7. Three Possible Roles: What If I Had Been There?

So when a historical tragedy occurs, we can also ask ourselves: if I had lived in that era, what kind of person would I have been?

Let me make this more concrete rather than leaving it abstract.

The first possibility: the active participant.

The summer of 1966. A middle-school student — perhaps your father, your mother, your uncle. He is sixteen. He wears a green army uniform. He is excited, and he genuinely believes he is doing something great. He may have taken part in a struggle session. He may have smashed things. He may have written a denunciation. Today he is eighty, and he does not want to talk about it.

Should he be held to account? He was a minor. He had been indoctrinated for a decade. What should he do today?

The second possibility: the silent bystander.

The same summer, another middle-school student. He took no part, but he said nothing either. He saw a neighbour dragged out. He stayed inside. He was hungry, he was frightened, and he wanted no trouble. He did nothing bad. But if he thinks back today, something still catches in his chest.

The third possibility: the one centimetre.

Also that summer, there was someone else. Perhaps a cadre, a teacher, a workshop supervisor. He could not change the situation. But within the small range that he could decide, he did something different. He crossed a name off a list. He warned a family in advance: "Don't be at home tonight." At a struggle session he said a few vague things that kept it from turning worse.

We have no way of knowing how many such people there were, because people who did this usually never spoke of it. But almost everyone who lived through that era probably knew one such person — and was probably helped by one.

These three roles are not there for you to judge anyone. They are there so you can ask yourself one question:

If it were me, is there any chance I would have been the third kind?

And the answer to that question is not found in that era. It is found today. Have you practised being the third kind of person today? Have you spoken up for someone with whom you had no connection? Have you done a small thing in a setting where nobody would thank you for it?

You have to have practised it to be entitled to the answer.

 

8. Why Ordinary People Must Ask This Question

Finally, let me explain why this chapter is about history at all. What does it have to do with walking out of The Truman Show?

The connection is this: after Truman walks out of the studio, the most important thing is not to hate the director and all the actors.

If, once outside, he simply hates every actor, he still has not understood the studio. Because the studio was not built by one bad man. It was maintained by many people together: some designed it, some ran it, some informed, some stayed silent, some were simply "going to work."

So what he really needs to do is understand: how did that studio actually operate?

Only by understanding the past do we find it easier to recognise the present.

And in recognising the present, there is one especially important warning: the same mechanisms may exist around you today in another form. Not as a "Cultural Revolution," not as a struggle session. It may be silence in the office, consensus in a group chat, the things everyone understands and nobody says. Today, abroad, that thing may have become an automatic avoidance of any topic touching home.

History is not for judging the past. It is for giving you the chance, in some small moment today, to raise the muzzle one centimetre.

 

 

Part Three: Pulling the Concepts Apart

 

Chapter 5: Are China and the Chinese Communist Party the Same Thing?

Now let's return to China.

In the previous two chapters we talked about the wall, about the oath, about history. Now we come to a more fundamental question. It looks simple, but it goes very deep. Because it determines whether you can even state your case clearly.

The question is: are China and the Chinese Communist Party the same concept?

 

1. Looked at Historically

Historically, obviously not.

Chinese civilisation is far older than any modern political party. Before the Communist Party existed, China already had the Book of Songs and the Analects, the fu of the Han and the shi and ci of Tang and Song, the Silk Road, the voyages of Zheng He, and countless thinkers, artists, scientists, and ordinary labourers. The Qin dynasty ended; China did not. Han, Tang, Song, Ming, Qing — one after another became history, and Chinese culture continued.

Let's look at some concrete dates.

The earliest poems in the Book of Songs go back to roughly the eleventh to sixth centuries BCE. Confucius lived from 551 to 479 BCE. Oracle-bone script is older still — over three thousand years. Papermaking, printing, the compass, gunpowder: all four great inventions predate any party. Li Bai, Du Fu, Su Shi, Cao Xueqin, the painters of Dunhuang, the labourers who built the Great Wall, the engineers who built Dujiangyan — none of them belonged to a party.

The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921. The People's Republic of China was established in 1949.

Put those two numbers on the same timeline and you see it: if you compressed the whole history of Chinese civilisation into a single day, the Party and the new China would occupy only the last hour or so.

That is not belittling anything. It is the basic proportion of the facts.

 

2. An Ancient Distinction: Losing a Dynasty vs. Losing the World

Interestingly, Chinese thinkers of the past drew a similar distinction long ago.

In the late Ming and early Qing, a great thinker named Gu Yanwu wrote a famous passage in his Record of Daily Knowledge. In substance:

"There is the loss of a state, and there is the loss of all under heaven."

What is the loss of a state? A change of dynasty — one ruling house replaced by another. That is "losing a state." It is mainly the business of rulers, of those who eat meat.

What is the loss of all under heaven? It is the destruction of an entire civilisation, an entire moral order, an entire way of life. That is "losing all under heaven." And for that, "even the humblest commoner bears responsibility."

Later this was compressed into eight characters: "The rise and fall of all under heaven is the responsibility of every commoner."

That passage is very clear: a dynasty, a regime, a party is one thing; a civilisation, a culture, a way of life is another. The fate of the first does not automatically mean the fate of the second. Chinese people four hundred years ago already made that distinction cleanly.

We can also look at the modern era. In the late Qing, Liang Qichao put forward the concept of the "Chinese nation" to separate the court and the dynasty from the nation. At that time many people were arguing over one question: is overthrowing a regime a betrayal of the country? Many had already given their answer: a regime can be judged; a civilisation must be inherited.

 

3. Three Questions That Must Be Separated Today

Today, the Chinese Communist Party holds a leading position in the political system of the People's Republic of China. But a leading political position does not mean a party can be equated with the whole of China, still less replace China's long history and culture.

So we should separate at least three questions:

First, do I love my motherland?

Second, do I endorse the current political system?

Third, do I agree with the ruling party's specific policies and its historical conduct?

These three questions are related, but they are not the same question.

A person can cherish Chinese culture and criticise a government policy at the same time. A person can love Chinese food, read Tang poetry, listen to Peking opera, care about Lunar New Year, teach his children Chinese, and believe a particular policy is wrong. That is perfectly coherent. There is no contradiction at all.

And a person who criticises the Chinese Communist Party cannot, on that basis alone, be labelled as opposing China.

 

4. How the Word "Motherland" Gets Used

Let me insert a linguistic observation here, because it explains a great deal of confusion.

The word "motherland" carries enormous weight in Chinese. Its emotional charge is close to that of "mother." That emotional force makes it extremely useful: connect any position to "the motherland" and opposing that position automatically becomes a moral failing.

Have you noticed? In many arguments, the accusation "unpatriotic" is more effective than any substantive rebuttal. Once the label is attached, you no longer have to discuss facts.

But there is a substitution at work. "Motherland" refers to the language, the land, one's family, memory, writing, food, festivals, that stretch of mountains and rivers. It is not shorthand for a political organisation. When you take a specific policy, a specific organisation, a specific period's decision and call it "the motherland," you turn a question that can be discussed into one that cannot.

I draw this distinction not to make anyone love China less. Quite the opposite — it is so that a person can love China genuinely: love its concrete culture, concrete people, the concrete land, instead of being forced to choose between loving a whole and judging a policy.

China was not created by a modern political party. The ancestors, writing, history, and culture of the Chinese people all long predate 1921. If the Party is fully equated with China, then criticising the Party is easily framed as "anti-China"; and a party's mistakes are easily confused with the mistakes of an entire people. That is exactly what blurs the distinction between nation, people, civilisation, and party.

 

5. A Slippery Slope That Must Be Stopped

There is a logical slide here, and we should see how it works.

The first sentence: "The Chinese Communist Party leads China." — This is a factual statement about the system.

The second sentence: "China is the Chinese Communist Party." — This merges the country with the party.

The third sentence: "Criticising the Chinese Communist Party is anti-China." — This follows from the second.

The fourth sentence: "You are unpatriotic." — This is the conclusion, and the endpoint. At this point the discussion is over.

Of these four steps, the real transformation happens in the second. Up to the first, discussion is still possible. After the second, it is not. And nearly all arguments of this kind die at the second step.

So whether a person can separate China from the Chinese Communist Party is not just an academic matter. It is whether you can keep speaking at all.

 

6. Once Separated, You See More Clearly

An overseas Chinese person re-examining the Party does not mean he must abandon China. On the contrary, once the two are separated we may see more clearly.

We can start asking questions that could not be asked before:

What belongs to traditional Chinese culture? The things handed down for thousands of years: the sense of responsibility in family ethics, the primacy of education, respect for the written word, food and festivals, aesthetics and craft, poetry and calligraphy. None of this was invented by a party, and none of it belongs to any regime.

What comes from modern political movements? Things that are more recent: certain organisational forms, certain methods of propaganda, certain narratives about history, certain standards for "what counts as a correct thought." These are products of the twentieth century, and they will have their own historical fate.

What is worth continuing to cherish? Diligence, thrift, respect for education, care for parents, a sense of responsibility to the collective. These are good, and they remain useful today.

What should be left to history to reflect on? The things that caused harm: the suppression of individuals, the way facts were handled, the way "dissenting views" were defined.

As a Chinese person now living abroad, you hold something particularly valuable: you can see both sides at once. You know how things are said in a Chinese-language setting, and you know how they are said in another setting. That is a rare capacity. Don't waste it.

 

Chapter 6: What Does It Mean to Leave an Organisation?

Many people who grew up in mainland China joined the Young Pioneers; some joined the Communist Youth League; some became members of the Chinese Communist Party. Once a person emigrates, what do those past political identities mean today?

 

1. First, the Practical Level: Organisational Membership

Let's start with the technical, procedural part, because that part is clear.

According to these organisations' own rules: Young Pioneers are expected to leave the Pioneers beyond a certain age; Communist Youth League members who reach twenty-eight without holding a League post are expected to complete departure procedures; the Party constitution also sets out procedures for resigning from the Party and for automatic withdrawal — for example, a member who, without valid reason, fails to take part in Party organisational life for six consecutive months, or fails to pay dues, or fails to do work assigned by the Party, is considered to have withdrawn automatically.

So on the membership rolls, many people's status has in fact already ended. If you left twenty-five years ago, never paid dues, never attended organisational life, then under the Party constitution you withdrew automatically long ago.

So why do so many people still feel that this matter is not finished?

Because organisational procedure resolves the question of the roster. It does not resolve another question.

 

2. The Question of the Oath

That question is: what becomes of the oath you spoke with your right hand raised?

After the publication of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party in 2004, a campaign known as the "Three Withdrawals" emerged among Chinese communities at home and abroad — declarations withdrawing from the Chinese Communist Party, the Communist Youth League, and the Young Pioneers. A declaration may be made under a real name, or under an alias or childhood name. So "public declaration" here does not mean a person must disclose his real identity.

According to cumulative figures published by the Three Withdrawals website, by September 2026 more than 466 million people had declared withdrawal from the Party, the League, and the Pioneers. What is counted here is the number of people represented by the declarations, not simply the number of declarations the site has received. One declaration may represent one person, or may explicitly represent several.

I want to be honest here: this is a figure published by the organisers on their own terms, and whether everyone accepts it is open to discussion. You are entirely free to look into it, to ask about it, to do your own arithmetic. I am simply stating it accurately: it is the number represented by the declarations, not an independently verified count.

Why do some believe that even after the age limit has passed, even after decades without organisational activity, a specific declaration is still needed?

Because what the Three Withdrawals initiative focuses on is not only the identity on the roster, but the oath taken at the time. Under this religious understanding — "what a person does, heaven sees" — a person who joined the Party, the League, or the Pioneers once raised his right hand and swore an oath before a flag. Later the age limit passed, or the organisational relationship changed, and that resolved the organisational tie in real life. But it does not mean the person himself has actively negated the oath he once made.

So for those who accept this understanding, the Three Withdrawals is first of all a spiritual choice: to make a decision again, for oneself, and to state clearly that the old oath no longer represents who you are today.

Why can an alias be used?

Because under this understanding, what matters is not the ID number in the real world, nor letting others know "who I am," but whether the person has genuinely made this choice. So the initiative understands it as a spiritual public declaration, not as the public exposure of a real identity.

Some accept this religious understanding; some do not. That is a question each person must think through for himself.

 

3. Getting the Three Withdrawals Right

I particularly want to get this right, because it is easy to get wrong. Whether or not you accept it, you should at least understand the initiative accurately:

First, it is not only about whether a person is still on an organisation's roster today.

Second, it raises a different question: does that oath still represent me today? This is a question about personal integrity and inner consistency. It is not a question about files.

Third, it contains a religious premise. "What a person does, heaven sees" is a religious proposition, not one that can be scientifically proved. Those who accept it will regard the declaration as substantively meaningful; those who do not will regard it as having no effect. Both attitudes deserve respect.

Fourth, it contains a figure that can be discussed. The declaration is made voluntarily. You may choose to do it, or choose not to. Not doing it does not mean you are unfree; doing it does not mean you are more clear-sighted than others. It concerns only a person's relationship with himself.

 

4. What Ritual and Oath Are, Anthropologically

Let me step outside China for a moment and talk about an anthropological observation. It will help you understand why ritual and oath have such power everywhere in the world.

Almost every civilisation has had ceremonies of this kind: having a person, in a public setting, with witnesses, use a bodily action to declare that he belongs to a group.

Roman soldiers swore allegiance. Medieval knights performed homage when they were invested. Christian baptism and confirmation. The Islamic testimony of faith. The oaths of Japanese samurai. Modern naturalisation ceremonies, military oaths, the professional oaths of doctors and lawyers.

These rituals share several elements: a bodily action (raising a hand, kneeling, touching an object), a fixed set of words, a group of witnesses, a symbol (a flag, a book, an object), and a solemn atmosphere (music, uniform clothing, a fixed place).

The purpose of all this design is to make those words enter a person's body, not only his memory.

So one feature of ritual is this: it leaves a deeper trace in the body than in the reason.

This explains a common experience: a person who took part in an induction ceremony decades ago may, upon seeing that flag today or hearing that song, have a bodily reaction before his reason catches up. That reaction was not chosen by him. It came from the ceremony.

So the question becomes: how does a person deal with this "mark in the body"?

Some choose to treat it as cultural memory, like a song they sang as a child — it belongs to the child they were, not to the adult's judgement. Some choose to perform a new ritual — declaring a withdrawal, for example — using a new action of their own to overlay the old action that was arranged for them. Others choose to do nothing at all, and simply understand inwardly that "it no longer represents me."

All of these roads are available. What I want to say is: none of them can be walked for you by someone else. Someone will tell you "do this and you'll be fine." Someone will tell you "this is very important." Someone will tell you "this is ridiculous." But in the end, this is a question between you and yourself.

 

5. If You Remove the Religious Premise

What if I don't accept that religious premise? Does that mean the Three Withdrawals has nothing to do with me?

Not necessarily. Because the question it raises can be detached from its religious premise and become a universal one:

"What do I do with a promise I made in the past, when I did not truly understand it?"

Notice that this question arises in everyone's life.

A person was signed up for piano lessons by his family as a child, practised for eight years, and stopped playing as an adult. A person promised his parents something and later found he could not deliver. A person joined an organisation, signed an agreement, committed to something when he was young, believed he understood it, and later discovered he hadn't.

The mark of an honest person is not that he never made promises. It is that he is willing to go back and examine each one: does this still count? And if it counts, do I still mean it today?

This kind of review needs no website, no ceremony, no one else knowing what you did. It needs only this: on a quiet evening, you take out those few past promises and look at them, and then decide the fate of each one.

You may find that some of them you still hold to — you still believe in being decent to people, still believe in honouring your parents, still believe in doing your work seriously. Then keep them. And you will find that these promises are now your own choice, not something given to you.

And there may be some that you decide to set down. Then set them down — on the condition that you are clear about why.

That is what being an adult means.

 

6. The Final Question

Some who have made a Three Withdrawals declaration say that afterwards they felt a weight lifted, and that they had made a choice about their own life again. These are personal experiences. Others may believe them or not.

But the final question can only be answered by the person himself:

If I stood before that flag again today — if I already knew the history I did not know then, if I truly understood what those words of the oath mean — would I be willing to say it once more?

If you say "no," be clear about what you are saying no to. Is it no to a specific organisation, or no to the whole idea that someone else decides what you must believe?

If you say "yes," then give yourself a reason — a reason you can state as an adult. Because a "yes" like that carries weight. And a "yes" like that is also genuinely your own.

 

Chapter 7: Once You Are Out, How Do You Avoid Walking Into Another Studio?

The film is not quite finished. Because so far we have been dealing with the first half of the problem: how to get out of the studio. But there is a second half, and it may be harder than the first.

 

1. A Supposition: Truman Gets Arranged a Second Time

Let's imagine a little further. Suppose that after Truman walks out, he meets another group of people who tell him: "We already know what the real world is like. You only need to believe us."

They give him a pamphlet. They give him a complete explanation of the world. They tell him who the good people are and who the bad people are, what is right and what is wrong. And much of what they say may be true — far truer than anything the director in the studio told him.

If Truman from then on stops observing and stops questioning, and simply transfers all the trust he once had in the director to someone else — has he walked into another studio?

I want to stress: "another" here does not point at any particular organisation or direction. It is a general psychological risk. When a person jumps from one unexamined belief straight to another unexamined belief, structurally speaking he has never left any studio at all.

 

2. From One Belief to Another

Let me tell you two stories that feel very real.

The first is about a Chinese engineer in New York.

His surname is Wang. He went abroad in 2008, and around 2015 he began reading a great deal of critical material about China. His transformation was considerable, from one kind of certainty to another. He started watching a dozen channels a day, forwarding huge amounts of material, arguing with people in group chats, often arguing until two in the morning.

Then his wife said something that stopped him cold. She said: "The way you are now is exactly the way you were when you were forwarding those patriotic articles every day. You've just changed sides."

Wang later reflected on it and found this was true. Back then he believed "the official account" because he felt it was authoritative. Now he believes certain online commentators, for the very same reason — because he feels they are authoritative, except this time it is an anti-authority authority. His sources had changed. His method of handling information had not. He had never once stopped to ask: "How reliable is this new source? What kinds of errors does it make? Is it possible that it exaggerates?"

This is a very common shape. I sometimes call it the reverse Truman — the body has gone outside, but the method of judgement is still in there.

The second story is one many people have experienced: the atmosphere in a group chat.

Among overseas Chinese WeChat groups there are groups of every tendency. Some groups criticise everything; some defend everything. Say something slightly off-key in the latter and you will be set upon. Say something slightly moderate in the former and you will also be set upon.

What is interesting is that the two mechanisms of attack are identical. Both work like this: judge the position first, then judge the facts; ask which side you are on first, then ask whether what you said is correct.

So the real question is not which side you stand on. It is what method you use to judge. A person can be thoroughly opposed to a regime and still be someone without independent judgement. A person can hold conservative views on many issues and still be an excellent critical thinker.

A position is not a mode of thought.

 

3. Karl Popper: What Makes a Claim Testable?

Here I want to bring in a philosopher, because this tool is so useful and so simple.

Karl Popper was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. In the 1930s he proposed a criterion for distinguishing science from non-science. His answer was surprisingly simple:

What makes a claim scientific is not whether it can be confirmed, but whether it can be falsified.

What does that mean?

He said that Adler's psychology and Marx's theory of history look powerful because almost anything can be fitted into their explanatory frameworks. If something happens, you can say "this was the inevitable working-out of class conflict." If it doesn't happen, you can say "history took a detour." Whatever happens, the theory holds.

Popper said: a theory that can explain every possible outcome thereby explains nothing. Because no possible observation could show it to be wrong, it is not a claim that can be tested.

He contrasted this with Einstein's theory of gravitation. Einstein said: light passing near the sun will bend by such and such an amount. That was a very specific prediction. If the 1919 eclipse observations had not matched, Einstein's theory would have been finished.

That is the difference. A claim worth having gives you a chance to defeat it.

Now apply that tool to daily life. Here are some questions you can take away and use to check anyone's claims — including your own.

First question: what evidence would change your mind?

If a person's answer to any claim is "there could never be such evidence, because…", note that he is not stating a fact. He is expressing a faith.

Second question: if my view were wrong, what would the world look like?

If you cannot describe a world in which you are wrong, then your view has already become untestable.

Third question: have I mistaken "I want this to be true" for "this is true"?

This is the most dangerous one. People often believe something not because of evidence but because the belief is comfortable — it makes you feel safe, loyal, on the right side of history. Comfort is an excellent signal. It signals: be especially careful here.

 

4. Five Common Traps

Let me list the pits we most easily fall into. Each with an example.

Trap one: because one source is unreliable, everything it says is false.

If you discover that an outlet exaggerated something, you cannot conclude that everything it says is false. If a critic is caught saying something wrong once, you cannot conclude that everything he says is wrong. Dismissing a person wholesale is laziness. The right approach is to judge item by item.

Trap two: because I believe the conclusion, I don't check the evidence.

This is the most comfortable state to be in. You read a claim that matches your judgement, your body relaxes, you think "so it's true after all," and you forward it. That is exactly the moment that most needs checking.

Trap three: cancelling facts with motives.

"He says that because he's paid / because he hates China / because he wants fame." Even if the motive is real, it does not follow that what he says is false. Judging a motive is not a substitute for examining an argument. This holds for both sides.

Trap four: using "it's complicated" to cancel judgement.

"This is too complicated, we can't really say." Some things are indeed complicated. But complexity is sometimes a shield used to avoid a conclusion you don't want to reach. Complicated things need more patience, not less judgement. You can say: "On the present evidence, I lean this way, though I am not a hundred percent certain." That is how an adult speaks.

Trap five: using "they did it too" as an argument.

"America did the same thing." Even if true, that cannot show that this thing was right. What another country did wrong never changes the question of what is right and wrong here.

 

5. A Toolkit for Truman

If Truman is to walk out of the studio and not walk into another one, he needs more than courage. He needs tools.

I have put together a toolkit. It is short — five rules.

Rule one: separate "this feels true" from "there is evidence."

A feeling is information, not a conclusion. When something stirs you strongly, that is a signal: "there is something here that I should look at more closely."

Rule two: treat no single person or source as incapable of error.

However authoritative it is. Including this book. Including me. When you have finished listening, you can disagree, and you can accept only part of it. That is the correct way to use a book.

Rule three: deliberately read things you dislike.

Not once in a while. Regularly. The reason is simple: the things you most need to examine are the things you have already decided are wrong. If you never read them, you are only reinforcing yourself.

Rule four: make your judgements specific.

Don't just say "I think this government is bad" or "I think this government is good." Write out the specific facts, the specific years, the specific events. Specific judgements can be tested. Vague judgements can only be used for fighting.

Rule five: allow yourself to change, and allow yourself to hold firm.

Changing is not betrayal, and holding firm is not stubbornness. The dividing line is: can you state why you changed, or why you are holding firm?

 

6. Popper's Other Point: The Paradox of Tolerance

Popper has another famous observation that I want to bring in here, because it is especially useful to us.

If you are infinitely tolerant of the intolerant, tolerance itself will be destroyed.

There are two ways to read that sentence, and I want to lay out the careful reading.

What it means is: an open society need not be obliged to remain open to forces that use violence to cancel discussion. But note — this applies only to forces that use violence or coercion to cancel discussion. It does not apply to "people who disagree with you." People who disagree with you are precisely the precondition of discussion, not its enemy.

Confuse those two and you arrive at a terrible conclusion: "so people with different views should be eliminated." That is not Popper. That is exactly what he was arguing against.

So the rule works like this: be tolerant of views; be wary of acts that cancel discussion.

In the context of this book, that distinction matters enormously. Because we have spent the whole book discussing how to tell whether someone is arranging our thinking for us. If we ended up concluding "so we should eliminate the people who arrange our thinking," we would only have walked out of one studio into another — and taken weapons with us.

 

Conclusion: So Where Exactly Is That Door?

 

1. Back to the Door

Let's return once more to The Truman Show.

Truman sails his boat and strikes the wall of the studio. He follows the wall and finally finds a staircase. At the top of the staircase is a door to the outside world.

The director tells him: the world outside also has deception, and danger. Wouldn't it be better to stay? There is safety here, and order. I have arranged everything for you.

Truman does not argue. He smiles faintly, pushes the door open, and walks out.

I want you to notice that faint smile. It is not an angry expression. Truman does not shout. He does not curse. He does not say "you deceived me for thirty years." He smiles, and then he leaves. There is something very mature in that smile: he does not need to hate them in order to leave them.

I hope everyone who reads this book takes that smile away with them.

 

2. The Five Questions, Checked Again

Let's review the five questions we discussed today. We are not here to supply answers. We are here to ask the questions precisely.

First, when we are unwilling to state a view, we should ask: is this my choice, or is it fear left over from the past?

Note the difference between two things: justified caution is a form of wisdom; avoidance you cannot explain is a form of inertia. Caution is conscious. Inertia is not.

Second, when we look back on the political education of our youth, we should ask: does the identity I accepted at seven still represent my understanding today?

Childhood was real. The oath can be answered again. You do not owe the past a version of yourself that stayed where it was.

Third, when a historical tragedy occurs, beyond studying the system and those in power, we should also ask ourselves: what role did ordinary people play? If conscience and orders conflict, can I raise the muzzle one centimetre?

And that one centimetre is not courage in the critical moment. It is a habit accumulated in ordinary times.

Fourth, the nation and the party are not the same concept. Cultural identity, national identity, the political system, and a specific political organisation must be seen separately.

The way you love China does not need to run through protecting a particular political organisation.

Fifth, when we face again the Party, the League, and the Pioneers we once joined, beyond the organisational relationship in real life, we can also ask: does the oath I made then still represent me today?

That question can be answered with a faith, or without one. Either way, it is a question that belongs to you.

These five questions look different. In the end they are all the same question:

Whose, in the end, is my mind?

 

3. That Line from Confucius

Confucius said in the Analects: "Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous."

More than two thousand years ago, the Chinese already knew: learning and thinking, neither can be missing.

Applied to us today, we can put it this way:

"Learning" means exposure to different information. Reading books, reading different accounts, hearing different arguments.

"Thinking" means not treating what you receive directly as a conclusion. Asking where it comes from, asking whether there is counter-evidence, asking why you believe it.

Learning without thinking turns a person into a container for information — whoever pours fastest wins. Thinking without learning turns a person into a prisoner of his own notions — ever more confident, ever less grounded.

Today we live in an age of information explosion. In one second we can reach more than a person in antiquity could reach in a lifetime. But more information does not mean we are necessarily closer to the truth. Because what people most readily believe is often exactly what they want to believe.

What is genuinely difficult is four things:

Facing a fact you dislike, and still being willing to acknowledge it;

Facing a view you like, and still being willing to examine it;

Discovering that a past judgement was wrong, and having the courage to correct it;

After re-examination, finding that a past understanding still holds — and knowing why you hold to it.

That last one is often overlooked. Many people assume independent thinking means constant overturning. It does not. A person who holds firm after repeated examination needs more evidence than one who overturns everything. Genuine independent thinking means not handing your judgement over unconditionally to anyone — including not to "the opposition."

 

4. The Door May Not Be a Door

The Truman of the film finally walks to that door. For each of us, that door may not be a literal door.

It may be a book you have never read.

It may be a piece of history you never knew.

It may be a serious conversation with someone who holds a different view.

It may be the first time you calmly say, in Chinese, a sentence you have never dared to say.

It may be the fear-list you write for yourself — and then discover it is smaller than you thought.

Or it may simply be that one day we suddenly ask ourselves: these things I have never doubted — did I actually think them through myself?

The moment a person begins to ask that question, the door has already opened.

 

5. Not Another Arranged World

Let me say one more time, at the very end, because I am afraid of being misread.

Walking out of Truman's world is not about walking into another world arranged for us by someone else.

If a person goes from believing this to believing that without changing his method of judgement, he has not walked out of anywhere. He has simply moved from one studio into another — and is quite likely more zealous in the new one than he was in the old.

Walking out of Truman's world is about taking back a most basic capacity:

To observe for yourself, think for yourself, judge for yourself, and take responsibility for your own choices.

The freedom genuinely worth treasuring is not someone else deciding for us what we should believe. It is our being able to decide, on the basis of evidence and conscience, what we ourselves believe.

When a person begins to see the world this way, he has already taken an important step.

As for what lies beyond that door — let's go and see for ourselves.

— End