Why We Open Mao's Selected Works

These past few days I've been chatting a lot with my friend Liang Mouyin, about all kinds of things.

Interestingly, Liang has gotten interested in materialist dialectics. After I explained it, he felt that once you master materialist dialectics, you can handle work and life as easily as chopping melons and vegetables.

We talked about a lot, and at one point I said to him: "I've noticed more and more young people are starting to read the Selected Works."

We didn't go into it, but it got me thinking: why? Why are more and more young people starting to read the Selected Works?

In this post, I want to share my own view.

I have a good friend, a brother really, whom I call Jiahua.

We've known each other for ten years, but he's never picked up the Selected Works because of me.

Once I seriously recommended he read it, and he replied: "I'll definitely read it, but not now. I'll read it at the hardest point in my life."

I reluctantly accepted that reason.

But thinking about it, why would Jiahua think the Selected Works would help at a low point in life?

Behind that simple reason, is there a common impression of the Selected Works, that it holds the secret and the strength to get out of a tough spot?

In 2018, I was in my second year at a vocational education center in Chongqing.

That summer, I joined an "internship" organized by the school, working in an electronics factory in Shuangfu, Chongqing.

Looking back with the mindset I have now, those two months may not seem like much. But for me at sixteen, they were an experience I'll never forget. I've mentioned it many times in earlier posts.

In short, I was somewhat depressed during that time. I'd often sit alone on my dorm bed and feel a chill shoot up from my tailbone along my spine straight into my brain, and feel that life was hopeless.

When the break ended and I went back to school, I wanted to find someone to drink with, but no one would. In the end I bought six cans of beer by myself, no snacks, and drank them all in the dorm.

The next day, my roommate told me I'd cried in the bathroom for more than two hours.

Looking back now, that was the biggest trouble of my growing up.

Unlike choosing a major or whom to like, it forced me to answer: how should a life be lived?

Back then I couldn't answer it, and my thoughts sank into an abyss. The morning after I sobered up, finding nothing by looking inward, I turned outward.

I started reading lots of literary fiction, hoping to find an answer in words. Yu Hua, Somerset Maugham, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Yukio Mishima, Cervantes: they all gave me their answers.

But their answers were always missing something.

Reading them was like trading life experience with old men. I got a lot out of it, but afterward I still felt lost.

Until one ordinary day, I can't remember whether it was an ebook or a paper copy, bought or borrowed, but anyway, I opened the Selected Works of Mao Zedong.

Back then I couldn't possibly have imagined that once I opened it, I might never be able to cut my ties with it for the rest of my life.

I've now been studying the Selected Works for seven years. What has it actually brought me?

It Built My World Outlook

In high school, I didn't have a complete world outlook, and I hadn't thought much about the world. The dialectical materialism in the Selected Works helped me build one.

The basic tenets of the dialectical-materialist world outlook include:

The world is material in essence
The world is universally connected
The world develops eternally
The fundamental cause of development lies in the contradictions within things

I won't go into detail here. In short, for young people, once you have a world outlook you trust, it's hard to change, and it keeps shaping how you act. Put simply, I believe a world outlook decides how a person faces the world they live in and their own life. A person's world outlook indirectly decides their life.

Building my world outlook amounted to answering my question, "What is the world, in essence?"

It Gave Me Materialist Dialectics

Built on dialectical materialism, materialist dialectics answers "What is the world like?"

My world outlook told me the world is material, but that isn't very practical on its own. It's like copying the answer on an exam without understanding the steps.

Materialist dialectics is the steps. It shows that the material world exists and develops dialectically. It isn't a formula or a truth. It's a method, a way of thinking.

Its three great laws are:

The law of contradiction (the law of the unity of opposites)
The law of the transformation of quantity into quality
The law of the negation of the negation

If my world outlook gave me a qualitative understanding of the world's essence, materialist dialectics is the greatest treasure the Selected Works gave me. I won't go into it here.

Why Are More and More Young People Reading the Selected Works Now?

First, two situations:

A Missing World Outlook

I have a younger sister. I've watched her grow from a baby into a high school student. Unlike me, who went to a vocational high school, she goes to the best key high school in our district.

Her grades aren't at the very top, but she's absolutely hardworking.

A while ago we were chatting, and she said school life is intense. She only sleeps six hours a night. After evening classes, she does homework and memorizes vocabulary until one or two in the morning before she can rest.

I'd long heard that high schoolers in the "four provinces of mountains and rivers" (Shandong, Henan, Hebei, Shanxi) work even harder, but when it happens to your own family, it's still hard to believe, even hard to accept.

A teenager sleeping six hours a night: is that reasonable? Under that kind of pressure, how are they supposed to think about life?

For many people, the answer is: they don't. There's only one goal in life: get into university.

That story has been ringing in my ears since childhood. Now that I've gone from participant to onlooker, I finally feel how much it means.

I never took the gaokao, the national college entrance exam, so I can't fully feel what it's like, but I was sixteen once too.

Back then I didn't have the pressure of ten thousand horses crossing a single-log bridge, and studying was easy. If not for the electronics factory, I might never have started reflecting on life either.

High schoolers like my sister have their lives packed full of study. Where would they find the time and energy to explore the world and think about the future? Everything has to wait until after the gaokao.

But after the gaokao, will the problems just melt away?

No. Back then we were like little sheep, always fighting ten thousand other sheep for grass. We thought that once we got past the gaokao we wouldn't have to fight so many sheep for grass. Little did we know that when the day came, we'd find ourselves in another pasture, with another ten thousand sheep.

And it doesn't end there. We keep fighting for grass, and when we graduate from university, we find there are hundreds of millions of sheep out there.

The sky falls.

We thought there was only one pasture in the world. Later we found out there are pastures everywhere, and sheep everywhere.

Nobody ever told us any of this: there's competition everywhere. Even when choosing a major for university, many people don't know where their interests lie, and in the end "easier to find a job" becomes a major factor in choosing.

I'm not saying it doesn't matter whether a major leads to jobs. I'm pointing out that students today, after finishing high school and all through university, have no concrete understanding of or thinking about their own lives.

That very phenomenon shows how many university students are missing a world outlook, so that when they enter society, they inevitably go through a lot of growing pains as they're socialized.

Dissatisfaction with Reality

After entering society, many young people are full of dissatisfaction with reality, mostly because of the gap between their ideals and reality.

"Kong Yiji's long gown that can't be taken off," a phrase that once went viral online, is the best example.

Because from childhood we drill into students' heads that only by studying hard will you have a good future.

That leads many people to believe that as long as they study hard, they're sure to have a good future.

Little did they know there's always someone better and learning has no end. On the road of study, how many people can actually climb to the very top?

Most people start working right after a bachelor's degree. Even knowing their education hasn't reached the top, they're still shaped by the idea that studying hard brings a good future.

After a few rounds of hard knocks in their first years of work, they find that not only is their career uncertain, but the ideal life they once imagined would be within easy reach has gradually become a castle in the air.

A tragic feeling of "why was I born into the same age as someone better" wells up. Did I study hard for more than ten years just to end up like this?

Where did it go wrong? Was I born in the wrong era, or did I join the wrong company?

The internet is full of voices venting emotions or offering simple answers, but most of them don't help.

What young people need isn't another success story. It's a truth that's more real, with more legitimacy behind it.

A missing world outlook leaves young people without a foundation for thinking. Any powerful thinking built on a weak, unstable world outlook does very little.

Dissatisfaction with reality is a direct result of the missing world outlook. Without a stable world outlook, even the best methods can't do their work. So even though young people can see all kinds of famous quotes online, they still feel empty and anxious inside, because their world outlook isn't strong enough to turn those things into principles that can guide their own practice.

The troubles of young people can be summed up as a search for three things.

The Search for Certainty

Many people strive their whole lives for nothing more than two things: a stable life and peace of mind.

But young people today have grown up in a highly uncertain era.

This has to do with the country, society, and the individual alike. Globalization has hit setbacks, the era of the nation's economic takeoff has quietly passed, career paths have become murky, and the story of "study hard = a good future" has gradually lost its correctness and authority.

All of this has brought a widespread sense of being lost.

We want to break through these uncertainties and clear away this confusion.

For that, we need something full of certainty that can help us see through the world and see our lives clearly.

The Search for Truth

When reality becomes a chasm standing between young people and their ideals, young people naturally start to doubt what they once believed.

And this is no longer an age when wisdom is passed on by word of mouth. Young people have the best information-search tools in history and superb search skills.

For anything at all, a quick online search or a question to AI will turn up some answers.

What's more, young people aren't a blind crowd. They have their own rules for sorting information and their own ability to tell good from bad.

It's under this combination of feeling lost, an explosion of information, and having standards for judging it that young people's search for truth becomes all the more urgent.

The Search for Agency

The two searches above, for certainty and for truth, in the end both turn into a search for agency.

What is agency? Simply put, it's the feeling of being able to understand the world and change it.

At work, for example, when someone has no systematic understanding of their job, they're sure to be often at a loss in front of their tasks. Once they have a systematic understanding of their job, they'll find ways to use their own initiative to change their work and improve it.

When a young person's life lacks certainty and a truth they believe in, and they're always sunk in confusion and doubt, they often feel powerless. It's like being at a tourist site packed with crowds: you want to go see the places you want to see, but you can't move your feet at all. You can only let the crowd push you forward, to who knows where.

With agency, that powerlessness and passivity vanish.

So young people, lacking a world outlook, need one to give them certainty. With life not going their way, they need a truth, so they can reach a state of agency.

These two situations are my answer to and analysis of the question "why are more and more young people reading the Selected Works now?" But this post doesn't stop here. There's one more question to discuss: why the Selected Works?

Why the Selected Works?

Set aside the question I raised at the start, and the points and analysis I've written are only a summary of the situation of some young people today.

On that basis, I need to talk about why the Selected Works can solve these problems.

On the Missing World Outlook

In "The Selected Works in My Eyes," I wrote about the highlights of how the Selected Works affected me most: shaping my world outlook and the use of materialist dialectics. So I won't repeat it here.

Just one point: systematically studying the Selected Works can help young people build a world outlook grounded in materialism.

On Life Not Going Their Way

Young people feel their lives aren't going well because, at bottom, their lives lack certainty, truth, and agency.

On Certainty

How do the Selected Works bring young people certainty?

As I said earlier, young people need something full of certainty that can help us see through the world and see our lives clearly.

The Selected Works not only give young people a complete world outlook that tells them what the world is in essence. The materialist dialectics in them also tells them the world is connected, developing, and full of contradictions.

Before actually reading the Selected Works, nobody knows what they really say. Some think they're the Teacher's (a nickname for Mao) personal success manual. Some think they're a political work.

Only after really reading them do readers find that the Selected Works are essay after essay the Teacher wrote while facing the same kinds of problems we face.

Just as I say you have to really read them, the Selected Works themselves were born in the process of really doing things. They analyze how a nation, a society, can achieve fundamental change out of poverty and weakness.

What they offer is a method of large-scale analysis of social forces, principal contradictions, stages of development, and strategies of struggle.

All of this is highly certain, because its core is practice.

Only in practice can young people stop venting emotions and daydreaming, and gradually get a grip on the certainty in reality.

On Truth

The Selected Works have never been the truth.

The Teacher said: "Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth."

So I believe that anyone who treats the Selected Works as the truth is a dogmatist.

At bottom, the Selected Works aren't truth. They're a method, a method that guides people in how to look for truth.

Just as the world develops eternally, truth can only gradually show itself through ceaseless practice.

On Agency

As I said above, the Selected Works analyze how a nation, a society, can achieve fundamental change out of poverty and weakness. They naturally carry an epic, heroic spirit and a fighting spirit of "struggling with heaven is endless joy."

This has real power to inspire young people who are lost and doubtful in today's society, because it tells anyone that beyond merely surviving by passively adapting, there's a completely different way to exist: actively creating.

And the moment a young person knows they can actively create is the moment they gain agency.

When someone has built a materialist world outlook from the Selected Works, and knows that practice is the sole criterion for testing truth, and that all things are universally connected and eternally developing,

their heart surges and their blood runs hot, and they set out to create their own future with their own hands.

At that moment they're like the boy who hasn't left school yet, still green all over, full of hope for everything ahead.

The only difference is that back then, he had nothing in his hands.

Now he holds a magic treasure in each hand.

The one in his left hand is called contradiction.

The one in his right hand is called practice.