I Joined a Mao's Selected Works Reading Group and Figured Out What's Scarcest in the AI Era

In the morning, I opened the WeChat official account assistant and saw a private message.

It was an image of a group chat QR code. The group was called "Selected Works Reading Group."

Honestly, I'm not interested in group chats like that. But since I've been writing about the Selected Works lately, I went in with a learning mindset: I saved the image, scanned the code in WeChat, and joined.

Why am I not interested in groups like this?

The reason is simple. The Selected Works is a political work, and studying and discussing it inevitably drags in a lot of political stuff. Personally, I can't stand that. Take my column, Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works: in the opening letter I stressed again and again that my aim is to take the politics out of the Selected Works and focus only on its "materialist dialectics."

So the thought of a group chat full of political talk sent a chill down my spine.

Of course, that's not all.

There's another reason. People my age who study the Selected Works and put it into practice, like me, are actually rare. In my real life I've never met a single one.

Online, I've published many posts about the Selected Works on my WeChat official account, and the vast majority of the readers who like, follow, and comment are from a different generation than me.

A big part of my hope in writing the Selected Works column is to spread its thinking among the post-2000s generation, my own age group.

The gap between that ideal and reality is another reason I'm not interested in reading groups like this.

After joining, I found the group wasn't small at all: a full hundred-plus people.

Going by profile pictures, there were quite a few people in the group who weren't that old, which I found interesting.

Later, I noticed people kept joining one after another. I figured the group owner was sending private messages in bulk through the official account system to people like me who'd written about the Selected Works, to promote the group.

After joining, I noticed many of the newcomers would post one of their own essays in the group. Most were about the Selected Works or Chairman Mao, and most of them were about how the thinking in the Selected Works had affected their own lives.

The writing in these essays was plain, mostly without fancy words, and the formatting wasn't polished. But it was precisely that plainness that made me feel all the more how great the great man's thought is.

I've always believed materialist dialectics is the most precious thing in Mao Zedong Thought. Set aside the history, set aside the politics, and it's a treasure of thinking that has stood the test of time.

Mao Zedong Thought is down to earth. Its ultimate aim is to make things actually develop, not to talk in the air, and that's why it feels plain and unadorned.

As I see it, people who truly see into things never throw around high-flown concepts when they decide and act. On the contrary, when I'm discussing a specific problem with someone, if they start throwing vague, conceptual words at me, I know they probably can't solve the problem in front of us.

Over time I read maybe a dozen or so essays in the group. Many came from a personal angle. Some just took the Teacher's thinking and started writing without connecting it to themselves. All in all, some were good and some weren't.

But after reading through all of them, one thing struck me as really good.

Most of the authors valued practice.

Someone who studies Mao Zedong Thought without knowing the viewpoint of practice and why it matters: to me, that simply won't do.

I'm not saying you have to study Mao Zedong Thought to learn the viewpoint of practice. It's that, in this era.

In this era, "knowing" has become cheaper than ever before.

Want to understand anything? Open an AI, ask one question, and in a few seconds it throws you a long piece that's neatly structured, full of references, and logically airtight.

What's materialist dialectics, what are the principal and secondary aspects of a contradiction, what exactly is the relationship between practice and knowledge? Ask DeepSeek, ask Claude, ask Doubao, and they'll answer a hundred times more beautifully than those plain essays in the group.

Not just more beautifully. Way, way more beautifully.

But I noticed something really interesting.

The beautiful answers, I read and forget the moment I turn away.

But the essays in the group, with their rough writing, ugly formatting, and some with typos still uncorrected, I'd finish reading and feel something catch in my chest.

Why?

At first I couldn't figure it out. Then one night, lying in bed, I somehow went over it all again, and suddenly it clicked.

Behind those plain words were people who had really gone and done it.

And behind the beautiful long pieces AI gave me, there was nothing.

It just takes everything people have ever written about "practice," rearranges it, and tells it to me in a very confident voice.

It has never practiced, not even once.

Speaking of which, I remember a line Chairman Mao wrote in "On Practice." It's very plain, but it has stuck with me ever since.

Roughly: if you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.

By eating it yourself.

See, when the great man explains something, he never goes in circles. He doesn't talk to you about high-dimensional constructions of epistemology. He talks about a pear.

Today's AI can write ten thousand words about the taste of a pear. How acidic, how much sugar, which variety, where it's from, whether it's crisp or mealy. It writes in more detail than anyone who's ever eaten a pear.

But it has never taken a single bite of a pear.

I said earlier that when I'm discussing a specific problem with someone and they open their mouth with a pile of vague, conceptual words, I basically know they probably can't solve the problem in front of us.

I used to judge this by instinct, by experience.

Now I've realized that the best at doing this in our era isn't a person anymore.

It's AI.

It's the most powerful "vague-concept generator" on the planet. Give it any specific problem, and it can instantly produce a passage that sounds unassailable and actually solves nothing. And in such a sincere, professional tone that you feel bad pushing back.

That's what's really a bit frightening about this era.

Not how smart AI is. It's that it makes "only knowing, never doing" far too comfortable, too respectable, too deceptive.

I'm not standing on the shore making snide remarks, either. When I write, I have my lazy moments too. AI throws me a passage, I glance at it and think, hmm, reads pretty smoothly, and I almost post it just like that.

That moment scared even me. I face this temptation every day, and I won't claim I've held out every time.

Looking back, I finally understood why the plainness of those essays in the group moved me.

Because fancy words have the texture of "knowledge," that slick sheen you get from reading a lot, copying a lot, combining a lot.

And plainness has the texture of "practice." Someone really stepped in and did it, stumbling along, with no time for rhetoric. The words grow out of the calluses on their hands, so naturally they're rough.

Rough, but they have body heat.

I've been running my WeChat official account for more than three years now.

I have a habit that friends who've followed me for a while probably know. Whenever something new comes out, I rarely sit at home reading what others say about it. I have to go buy it, install it, use it, and play with it until it breaks.

I've wasted plenty of money on this, stepped in plenty of holes, and done some things that look pretty dumb looking back.

I always thought this was just a quirk of mine, a stubborn streak.

Until I started writing the Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works column, and somewhere along the way, I was suddenly a little dazed.

Isn't what I've been doing just "On Practice" itself...

In my opening letter I stressed again and again that I'd take out the politics of the Selected Works and keep only the materialist dialectics. Back then I thought this was a "trade-off," a clever dodge.

Only now do I get it: take out the history, take out the politics, strip materialist dialectics down to its hardest innermost core, and it's one word.

Practice.

Back to that group.

When I first joined, I felt that gap inside. As I said, I write about the Selected Works with a big private motive: to spread this way of thinking among the post-2000s, among people my age. But the reality is that the people who like and comment are mostly from another generation, and in real life I've never met a single fellow traveler.

I always took this as a kind of loneliness.

But that night, after the pear thing clicked, I took out that loneliness and looked at it again.

I realized that the "loneliness" I'd felt came from using the wrong ruler to sort people, right from the start.

I'd been sorting by "age." I kept hoping to find people my own age.

But what you should really sort by was never age, or political stance, or who knows the Selected Works best by heart.

It's whether you've actually stepped in and done it.

The people in the group who take the Teacher's words without connecting them to themselves and write empty slogans about empty things, even if they're the same age as me, aren't my fellow travelers. They're just a human version of AI, doing what AI does, rearranging other people's knowledge one more time.

And the people whose writing is rough, but who have really worked this way of thinking into their own lives and used it to gnaw on their own tough bone, even if they were born in the sixties or seventies and are older than my dad, are my fellow travelers.

Practice doesn't care about age, or education, or which side you stand on.

It only asks you one thing: have you stepped in?

So the group I didn't want to join at all, and felt awkward about before I even joined, I haven't left.

I'm still in it.

I don't talk much. I just go in every day and scroll through those unbeautiful words with body heat in them. I treat it as a reminder nailed in place.

A reminder that, in an era when AI can give me every answer in an instant, I must never end up as someone who only "knows."

In this era there will be more and more people who can talk your ear off: closed loops of logic, references to the classics, all very impressive sounding.

Talk to them about something specific, and they'll take it up a dimension. Ask them how to actually make it happen, and they'll give you a methodology. Push once more and ask whether they've done it themselves, and they'll start lecturing you about the big picture.

There will be more and more people like this, because AI has stomped the cost of being one right down to the floor.

But AI can't taste the pear for you.

AI can't gnaw through your tough bone for you.

Chairman Mao's line has sat there for nearly ninety years, and in an era he couldn't possibly have imagined, it hasn't gone out of date. If anything, it's gotten harder.

If you want to know the taste of a pear, you have to eat it yourself.

Stop asking.

Go eat.