The Central Divine Master: Zhou Xiangyu

2008/1/8 16:53:58

Today, there's no way to avoid talking about him.

In the Tournament at Mount Hua, calling him the Central Divine Master would surely displease Old Man Mao's fans. But politics only cares about results—just like martial arts competitions: results are everything, and words mean nothing.

So what's the result? The result is that from beyond his passing, China's path extends in a line from where he left off. For a political figure, there is no result more worth resulting in than this—and what a grand fruit it bore.

Just as when discussing Old Man Mao and Bald Chiang, let me emphasize: when discussing politics, do not discuss morality. Morality is nothing but a plaything of politics. Only losers discuss morality—or when the victors need to hoodwink the masses, they too will toy with morality a bit.

Of course, this ID is half a fan of Mr. Lin. Mr. Zhou's move against Mr. Lin does not affect this ID's political assessment of Mr. Zhou. Mr. Lin was always a political pygmy; falling politically at the hands of the era's number-one master was his honor.

Mr. Zhou—a masterful wedge driven between the two greatest military geniuses of the era. Military affairs are merely the continuation of politics. A military genius is not necessarily a political genius. The top military genius is not necessarily the top political genius.

Well then, Mr. Lin was gone, and Old Man Mao's upward trend diverged from that point on. My God.

Throughout Chinese history, there is an eternal knot that can never be untied: the struggle between the eunuch/imperial-relative system and the administrative system represented by the Prime Minister. Chinese political history is, to a certain extent, the history of struggle between these two systems. This is not unique to China—abroad, the struggle between religious authority and royal authority has also been perpetual.

The struggle between these two systems is, in fact, structurally isomorphic to the primordial division between the spiritual and material dimensions of human existence. This is easy to understand for religious versus royal authority. For the eunuch/imperial-relative system versus the Prime Minister's administrative system, it's actually the same. The administrative system represented by the Prime Minister is essentially very material in nature. Why? Because the normal daily governance of a nation must first address the very material concerns of food, clothing, shelter, and transport for its people. The eunuch/imperial-relative system, on the other hand, consists of idle people with nothing better to do who specialize in concocting absurd concepts to torment people—some perhaps hoodwinking the emperor into seeking immortality through elixirs, others peddling grandiose visions of world order. But regardless, there is ultimately only one symbolic object whose possession matters most to this system, and that is: the Crown. Because whether eunuchs or imperial relatives, their power derives from one symbolic object: the Crown—a more spiritual existence.

So all struggles become easily understood. Even if the crown isn't a real crown but some other spiritual symbol, and the eunuchs and imperial relatives aren't real eunuchs and relatives but another kind of people empowered in a divine-right manner through some spiritual symbol—the essence remains unchanged. This symbol might even be a revolutionary concept and identity.

Well, the story needs no telling—Mr. Zhou won. The material triumphed over the spiritual; Mr. Zhou became the Central Divine Master.

Mr. Zhou won permanently. After the material defeats the spiritual, the spiritual can never return to that God-like symbolic state. The material creates its own spirit, and this spirit has nothing to do with the God-like spirit—it is essentially material in nature.

The significance of Mr. Zhou's victory has been revealed far too little. The whole world is blind. Turn back 1,000 more years, and this significance may become even clearer. Mr. Zhou was the ultimate terminator of the model in which power was bestowed through divine right via some spiritual symbol—whether intentional or not, in fact, it was so.

Mr. Zhou, eternal glory.