Is Hu Hansan Back Again?

2007/12/26 21:06:01

Just saw the news about the Luoyang Martyrs' Cemetery being leveled to make way for a commercial graveyard. I don't feel like writing anything; my heart is so congested it aches.

By all rights, nothing that happens these days should surprise anyone. You tell me — what can't be done nowadays? And yet it still aches.

This ID doesn't want to stir up regional debates, but Henan — the homeland of Jiang Ziya, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Wu Qi, Du Fu, Han Yu, Yue Fei, and especially Qi Jiguang — yet when the Japanese came, quite a few local farmers spontaneously helped the Japanese. What does that historical fact imply?

Ever since the Manchus, with a force of merely a hundred thousand, swept across the Central Plains, the backbone of the Chinese people was broken. The truth is, it's not a matter of any particular region. The calamity of the Japanese, the disaster of the Eight-Nation Alliance, the humiliation of the Opium Wars — all were seeded by the likes of Wu Sangui and his ilk.

In many people's eyes, the Japanese were simply another wave of Manchus. Those Henan people who helped the Japanese saw it this way: Chiang Kai-shek's blowing up of the Huayuankou dike had ruined them, while the Japanese "righteous army" was the one that truly carried on the traditions of Chinese culture. To this day, many people still discuss how Japan supposedly preserved authentic Chinese culture.

Extend this logic, and when the Americans come, people will line the streets to welcome them too. Why? Because they bring democracy — the kind that whips people into ecstatic climax. In fact, many people can hardly wait. Every night they gaze at the moon and declare: "Darling, where are you?!"

History is that cruel. And cruel history proves that if a similar future arrives, it will only be crueler still.

Luoyang Martyrs' Graves Leveled

Chán Zhōng Shuō Chán

Noble mansions with purple-gold streets
Grand courtyards with white-jade steps
A prosperous divine land of a thousand ten-thousand li
Where does one find seven feet of earth to bury the loyal dead?