Chapter 4: Crossing 4
86_86695Wang Shuhui is a modern person after all, and it is difficult for him to understand what kind of psychology the ancient people who lived in different environments and different cultures.
Wang Shuhui's care and help to Zhu Youzi's family is directly related to his own growth experience. When Wang Shuhui was a child, his mother was always sick, and his father worked outside all the year round in order to support the family, and Wang Shuhui was responsible for all the things at home. When he was in junior high school, his father ran away from home and never returned. He and his mother depended on each other, and within two years, his mother died in grief, and he completed high school with the help of neighborhood organizations, and then went to university, with a student loan, and was admitted to a publicly-funded master's degree, and finally stayed on to teach.
Under difficult conditions, Wang Shuhui exercised a resolute character. Don't ask for anything, this is Wang Shuhui's attitude towards life. Wang Shuhui, who has become a university teacher, has always lived alone, and Wang Shuhui, who teaches sociology, likes to read, usually surf the Internet for entertainment at home, and is very fond of researching historical issues. In his spare time, he also likes outdoor camping and has participated in many expeditions. Wang Shuhui has a calm attitude of not being surprised by changes, which is why after he traveled through ancient times, he could calmly meet ancient people.
After drinking tea, Wang Shuhui handed over two big burdens with clothes to Zhu Youzi's father and daughter. Originally, Zhu Youzi still wanted to serve Uncle Shi's shelf, but Wang Shuhui said, "If you don't wear warmer, your lung disease will recur", and the father and daughter honestly accepted daily necessities such as clothes and bedding.
Zhu Youzi originally wanted Wang Shuhui to live in their only decent house, but Wang Shuhui did not agree and insisted on living in the garden, because of his insistence, the father and daughter also agreed.
Although Zhu Weiyan's appearance is more strange, and her attitude is not as generous as before, Zhu Youzi's eyes also have some other flavors, but Wang Shuhui doesn't care too much. After teaching Zhu Weiyan how to use the iron stove, how to adjust the ventilation switch of the stove, how to use the things he brought, and telling him what the food was and how to eat it, he left the room and ran into the garden.
Wang Shuhui traveled back to the modern day through the light gate of the Guò Garden, returned to his home and began to think about what he had encountered in the past few days.
It's certain to cross, but it's unlucky, and it's the last years of the Ming Dynasty. In Wang Shuhui's view, the process of dynastic alternation between the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty was relatively drastic. From what he knew, in the last years of the Ming Dynasty to the early years of the Qing Dynasty, under the violent climate change of the Xiaoice River period, China's population attrition reached more than 80 million under the destruction of the peasant army and the massacre of the Manchu Qing Dynasty. It was not until the Kangxi period, the end of the Xiaoice River period and the promotion of high-yielding crops such as corn and sweet potatoes in China, that the population reduction finally ended.
It can be said that the Chinese living in this stage of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties were the most unlucky, even if they did not consider the shocking sweeps and destruction of the peasant army, nor the crazy massacres of the Manchu barbarians, that is, they simply wanted to be peasants, all because of the deterioration of the climate during the Xiaoice River period.
Wang Shuhui is neither a bright powder nor a clean manure. In his opinion, the good or bad of the Ming Dynasty had nothing to do with its own demise. In feudal society, feudal land ownership led to the concentration of land and the expansion of the interests of the privileged class, and no matter which feudal dynasty or who became the emperor, the shrinking state finances eventually led to the complete collapse of the feudal dynasty.
The Manchus eventually gained power of the state by virtue of their brutal methods, massacres and destruction of the privileges of the feudal landlord class. Although the Eight Banners aristocracy was also a privileged class, their scale was relatively small compared to the huge Han landlords, and a large number of massacres led to the attrition of the population and the shrinking of the privileged class, which ensured the revenue of the state treasury under the barbarian rule. This is the fundamental reason why the Qing Dynasty replaced the Ming Dynasty to rule China.
It can be said that the Ming Dynasty was ruled by the feudal landlords and bureaucrats who had become pathologically deformed, while the Qing Dynasty was ruled by the barbaric and crazy military aristocracy of Tongguò, and in this duel, the barbaric and crazy military aristocracy defeated the pathological and deformed feudal landlords.
From an ideological point of view, the Han civilization under the shackles of Cheng Zhu Lixue has reached a dead end. For more than 200 years after the fall of the Ming Dynasty, the Manchu Dynasty, as a minority regime, continued to embark on this desperate road, so that Chinese society did not get the slightest progress. In the end, the Manchu dynasty came to an end under the invasion of the Western powers, which represented an advanced civilization.
What really makes Wang Shuhui more regrettable is that in fact, the Han civilization itself is extremely advanced, as early as the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, advanced ideology and culture have provided a number of development routes for the development of the Han civilization. Macroscopically speaking, in the last years of the Song Dynasty and the last years of the Ming Dynasty, with the promotion of advanced productive forces, the Han civilization had two new opportunities to embark on a new path and gain a new life. And both of these opportunities were snuffed out by the invasion of the northern barbarians. The political and economic systems of the Ming Dynasty were on the verge of social evolution, but in the end, the process of Chinese social evolution was interrupted by the invasion of barbarians due to drastic climate change and the destruction of a deformed privileged class.
Wang Shuhui has always found it strange that the Chinese have never learned the historical lessons of the Wuhu Chaohua and the Yuan and Mongolian seizures. Westerners are also constantly developing under the destruction of barbarians, but they have obviously learned a lesson, "civilization does not eliminate barbarism, barbarism will destroy civilization", Westerners' understanding of the laws in the jungle, the understanding of the basic theorems of the operation of the world, obviously hundreds of years earlier than the Chinese.
Wang Shuhui believes that the backwardness of the Chinese in civilization began with Dong Zhongshu's exclusive Confucianism in the Han Dynasty, and the pseudo-Confucian culture, which was used and transformed by feudal rulers, has been standing still, and eventually led to the overall lag in the development of Han civilization. He felt that in order to completely change the backward situation of the Han civilization, on the one hand, it was necessary to introduce advanced culture, but more importantly, it was necessary to revive the classical civilization like traditional Chinese medicine and fundamentally adjust the vitality of the Chinese civilization itself.
In the past, Wang Shuhui's idea was just a simple talk on paper, but under the condition of crossing the door and saving the zài, in the complex and harsh conditions of the last years of the Ming Dynasty, but full of opportunities, it became a possibility to transform and promote the progress of Chinese society, which made Wang Shuhui, who had lived in mediocrity all his life, excited.
Whether or not to seize this opportunity and recreate a new China is a question that Wang Shuhui has to consider now.
Of course, he was also fully aware that the process of realizing the ideal of creating a new China was complicated and arduous, and even his life and survival in modern society were threatened. Wang Shuhui felt that in modern China, where industrial civilization was fully developed, his existence was insignificant. In the last years of the Ming Dynasty at the turn of civilizations, even if he could not realize his ideals in the end, the environment for realizing his ideals still existed.
The choice was difficult, and Wang Shuhui was not only in deep thought. Wang Shuhui, who was hesitating, suddenly saw a passage on his wall, which was the famous sentence of Paul Kochagin in "How Steel is Made", "The most precious thing of a person is life, life belongs to a person only once, a person's life should be spent like this, when he looks back on the past, he will not regret for wasting his time, nor will he be ashamed of doing nothing; In this way, at the end of his life, he will be able to say: 'My whole life and all my energies have been devoted to the most magnificent cause in the world—the struggle for the emancipation of mankind.' ’”。