In Pursuit of Learning

Preface

On January 17, 2019, the day that Out of the Gobi was first published, I appeared on stage at the Asia Society auditorium in New York City. I was joining Tom Friedman, the world-renowned Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist and best-selling author, for a fireside chat to launch my new book. It was a full house, with standing room only.

I opened the evening by thanking the audience. “I’m very honored and humbled by your presence.” I paused, before continuing, “Although I know all of you are here for Tom Friedman.”

That line drew much laughter.

Before the laughter died down, I added, “Me too.” The audience roared with more laughter.

I am immensely grateful to Tom for traveling with his son all the way from Washington, D.C., to join me on stage. I owe my book’s successful launch to him. His generosity and graciousness deeply humbled me.

Much of this book is devoted to my own experiences and those of my peers during China’s Cultural Revolution, a decade of turmoil launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 that ended with his death in 1976. At one point in our conversation, Tom asked me: “Do the young people in China know much about the Cultural Revolution?”

“Let me tell you a story,” I said in response.

In 2012, the chairman of a Chinese bank persuaded me to become an independent director of his company. Subsequently, the bank made a public announcement of my candidacy. Such a position required the approval of banking regulators.

After reviewing my documents and biographical information, the regulator sent me a request: Please provide the name of your secondary school. I replied that I had never attended secondary school. Then another question came: “Why did you not attend secondary school?”

I suppose the official in charge there was too young to know that during the Cultural Revolution, all schools in China were shut down for as long as 10 years. I was surprised—had his parents or teachers never told him? I couldn’t resist being mischievous: “For this question,” I wrote back, “please ask the Great Leader Chairman Mao.”

Apparently, the regulator didn’t appreciate my humor. My directorship was never approved.

The audience laughed again. But to me, it is sad and quite alarming that some in the younger generation—although I have no idea what percentage—don’t know about this chapter of China’s history.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” warned the Spanish philosopher George Santaya. Winston Churchill said something similar.

Indeed, history often repeats itself, remarked Hegel, the German philosopher. “The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” added Karl Marx, ridiculing Napoleon III’s ascension to the throne. Neither Hegel nor Marx insisted that history must repeat itself. But it is always possible, when people fail to learn from it. History itself is full of such examples—just think of how invading Russia was the beginning of the end for both Napoleon and Hitler.

That is why I wrote this book—to hopefully provide lessons from the history that my peers and I lived through. That history reads like a Greek tragicomedy with two parts: the Mao Zedong era and the Deng Xiaoping era.

The Mao era was an unmitigated calamity, marked by frequent political purges, a man-made famine that killed millions, social tumult, violence, and extreme poverty. Mao adopted a Soviet- style political and economic system that even the Soviets thought was too radical. He created an egalitarian society in which everyone was equally poor. His China was diplomatically isolated and economically closed. He left the country in utter ruins when he finally exited the stage.

The Deng era was what the Mao era was not. Mao was for a centrally planned economy modeled after the Soviet Union. Deng was for a market economy. Mao kept China closed. Deng opened up the country. A survivor of Mao’s purges, Deng learned a lesson from the disasters of his predecessor’s rule. He reined in government excesses and unleashed the “animal spirits” (a term coined by the famous economist John Maynard Keynes) in the population by encouraging private enterprise and entrepreneurship. It was his vision and pragmatism that transformed China from a poverty-stricken backwater to an economic juggernaut and the largest trading nation in the world. And it was his policies that lifted more than a billion Chinese out of poverty. Deng saved China.

Extraordinary lessons can be learned from this history.

Ernest Hemingway popularized the concept of “the Lost Generation,” the cohort of Europeans and Americans who reached adulthood at the time of the First World War. They were “lost,” I suppose, because the Great War had robbed millions of their lives and untold millions more of a normal life. The trauma of war left many bewildered, disoriented, aimless, and often jobless.

China also has a Lost Generation, one that came of age during the Cultural Revolution. It is the generation I belong to. We were lost because we were deprived of schooling at a young age, for a decade for some and forever for most.

Mao launched the Cultural Revolution with the stated purpose of purifying the country of capitalist ideologies and ridding the government, at all levels, of hidden “class enemies.” Mao called upon students and “the masses” of ordinary people to rise up and rebel against the establishment. Society was plunged into great turmoil: schools were shut; teachers were beaten up or killed; intellectuals, or anyone perceived as being one, were denigrated and persecuted. Nearly all economic activity ground to a halt. Eventually, the students themselves were exiled, en masse, to the remote countryside to be “re-educated” through farming and hard labor, with no hope of return. They were referred to as the “educated youth,” a comical misnomer as most lacked a basic education.

Around 1969, about 17 million of these “educated youth” were sent off, representing about 10 percent of China’s urban population (not to mention millions more young adults from rural areas, where more than 80 percent of China’s 800 million people resided). It was the most massive de- urbanization movement in human history.

Books were banned or burned. Reading was frowned upon or prohibited. Ignorance was celebrated as the way of the proletariat. Life was so harsh that after a day of backbreaking hard labor, few wanted to read anyhow. Lives were thus wasted as the years went by.

When the Deng era finally dawned, almost all “educated youth” were allowed to return to their home cities. But without a basic education, most of them struggled to find a decent job or a purpose in life. Just like Hemingway’s characters, they were quite lost in a changed world.

I consider myself to be a survivor of the Lost Generation in that I was able to get an education after the ordeal came to an end and to go on to pursue graduate studies in the United States. In the Deng era, such opportunities were open to all. But few were able to seize them.

Deng reinstated the college entrance examination system in 1977, after an 11-year hiatus. All those between the ages of 16 and 36 could apply. That extraordinary 20-year age bracket defines my generation. By my rough and conservative estimate, based on 10 million births per year on average, members of the Lost Generation made up some 200 million people out of China’s total population of about 950 million.

Although the exam was open to all, only 5.7 million took it. Of those, just 273,000 were accepted into college. Half a year later, in 1978, another exam was held for those who had missed the first one, adding a further 402,000 freshmen out of 6.1 million applicants.

All told, only five in a thousand in the age group born between 1947 and 1960 managed to eventually receive a college education. By comparison, the proportion of 18-year-olds in China who went on to attend college in 2018 reached 48 percent (about the same as in the United States).

I went to the United States to study in 1980. Statistics show that in that year, only 1,862 students from all of China received scholarships to study abroad. By comparison, there are about 3,000 to 4,000 lightning victims in China each year. A Chinese person was much more likely to be struck by lightning than to qualify for foreign studies at that time.

How did I beat the odds? Was I lucky or privileged? Neither. To start out with, my lot was the same as my entire generation—and worse than some who benefited from nepotism to get out of the Gobi and other hardship posts through “back doors.” The only thing I did differently from most of my peers was never to stop reading. During all those years, whatever books I could lay my hands on, under whatever harsh conditions—too cold, too hot, too tired, too late, too dark, or too dangerous—I read. I persisted for no other reason than to satisfy my insatiable curiosity and to cling to the hope that someday the knowledge could be useful.

“Fortune favors the prepared mind,” said Louis Pasteur, the French scientist who discovered the principles of vaccination and pasteurization. Indeed, when the Deng era came and opportunities arose, I was more than ready to seize them, fair and square.

“We cannot choose our external circumstances,” wrote the Greek philosopher Epictetus, who had been born a slave, “but we can always choose how we respond to them.” I believe that if we hope to get anywhere in life, a passion for learning is the only right response to any circumstance, because knowledge opens doors to opportunities when the right moment comes.

When I reflect on my past, there were several moments when I knew nothing would ever be the same again—that time was divided into two halves, before and after, even if I didn’t know what the future would bring. Sometimes I could feel such moments coming; at other times, they came as surprises.

We live in an uncertain world, goes the cliché. But it is true. There are history-changing moments, and there are also moments that only change your own life. More often than not, history and life changing moments come hand in hand.

I recall a conversation with Martin Wolf, the famed Financial Times columnist, on a sunny day in June 2022 in his office by the Thames River in London. He became an economist in 1971, he told me. Economists are in the business of making forecasts. Yet he gave a few examples of world-changing events that took everyone by surprise: Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with China in 1972, the 1973 Arab-Israel war, followed by the Oil Embargo that produced “the first oil shock,” the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and now the 2022 Ukraine War.

I can add to the list a number of shocks that were consequential to the world history: Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms and open-door policy from 1978, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Wolf’s point was that we must think about what is possible, even if it is the unthinkable— nuclear wars, civil wars, terrorist attacks—because of their unimaginable impact on human history and lives. And we must be prepared for them.

Is the world so troubled that we must consider the possibilities of the unimaginable? I am afraid it is. Today, we are at another critical moment in world history when optimism gives way to pessimism, international cooperation to conflict, globalization to decoupling, free trade to protectionism, convergence of values to divergence. Mankind is, at this moment, losing the battle against climate change that has produced devastating floods and droughts around the globe. The world is in a food and energy crisis, and it is also heading into a recession. Suffering is all around with little hope anywhere. The future looks bleak.

Yet, we live in the age of great technological revolution. New innovations constantly transform and improve the ways we live. Generally, life is getting better, and opportunities abound. In my youth, books were a luxury; there were no TVs or other forms of entertainment. Today, young people have unlimited knowledge—and unlimited distractions—at their fingertips.

There is however a paradox: the less you have, the more you appreciate what you have; conversely, the more you have, the less you appreciate it. Unlike members of China’s Lost Generation, today’s young people can take schooling for granted. But if they don’t appreciate the opportunity to learn as much as we did, they won’t get as much out of it as we did either. If they do, the world will be theirs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the world and upended lives. Yet, after almost three years, life is bouncing back, maybe stronger than ever. The world faces grim challenges at this moment, but it has seen worse—world wars, disasters, and crises. At times like this, I remind myself that nothing can be worse than the life in the Gobi, and that even then, there was hope. Was it by chance that the Deng era followed the Mao era, or was it a historical inevitability? In any case, I believe that those who don’t give up when circumstances are dire will be winners when the right time comes. It will just be a matter of time.

September 29, 2022 in Sicily, Italy