The wind is sluggish and the water is cold, and the strong man will never return.

One day at the end of September 1910, a tragic scene like a tragic scene more than 2,000 years ago appeared in front of the most fashionable and prosperous Tianjin Railway Station in the world.

The starring roles are naturally not Prince Yan Dan and Jing Ke, but for example, several Qingliu celebrities who can be counted today, Zhang Peilun, Wen Tingshi, Zhang Jian, and Yang Du.

Yes, that's right, in this time and space, Zhang Peilun and Wen Tingshi are still alive, although they look old and gloomy, and they look crooked at any time, but looking at their eyes, they can feel a still vigorous vitality and fighting spirit.

Needless to say, Zhang Jian was a champion in the late Qing Dynasty, but he actively engaged in industrial and commercial industry, and after more than ten years, he amassed tens of millions of assets and became the premier financier among the Qingliu literati in the world.

Yang Du, as a small character, is not an addition here.

In recent years, he has personally hosted the "China New News", and joined hands with Liang Qichao and Liu Kuiyi and many other brothers, comrades and friends to promote China's constitutional monarchy, trying to restore the old system of scholars and doctors ruling the world together with the Son of Heaven since ancient times. It is the standard-bearer vanguard of the opposition to the reluctance of the head of state to adopt the system, and the creation of a two-party, opposition, democratic parties, and so on, which stain the messy policies and systems.

But today, the four of them are all "Jing Ke" who may never return.

The place to go is Yining in Western Xinjiang, which has been regarded as a wild land by the literati of the Central Plains Dynasty for thousands of years, and is almost about to be sent to the shore of Lake Balkhash, which has been renamed "Yibohai".

From Tianjin to there, Totoer's journey is thousands of miles away. This is to put the ancient traffic conditions. Basically, you can't come back for the rest of your life.

Nowadays, there are direct trains. It can be reached in more than ten days, but when I think of the long distance, for the leaders of this group of literati, it is no different from the exile of Tangnu Wulianghai in the former Qing Dynasty.

The reason why these people were thrown there was naturally because in the past few months, the head of state had "lured the snake out of the hole" and deliberately let Yang Hao spread certain arguments to cause a big discussion across the country. Then these big fish hiding in the background are fished out, and finally the result is a net.

In the previous big debate, the focus was originally limited to "whether to do things when you are an official" and "physicists are not sinners who caused the regression of Chinese culture and caused China to be unable to enter modern civilization for a long time".

Its core is also a-for-tat refutation and questioning of the general norms of traditional Chinese culture that will be implemented to the whole country and the world after more than ten years of careful collation.

Because according to the new cultural norms, the study of Confucius and Mencius, which came down from the "Zhou Yi", is the core element of Chinese culture. In addition to allowing Confucian students to learn how to be officials and find jobs, they also need to learn to do things. Or it can be barely explained by Wang Yangming's theory of "the unity of knowledge and action".

And according to the meaning of the new norm. Combined with the remarks instructed by the Great Führer, it can be summarized as follows: "A qualified official must first be a moral model, and secondly, he must have real talent and real learning, and he must understand the people's suffering, rather than just sitting in the upper echelons thousands of miles away from the people and imagining and talking nonsense." Thirdly, if officials want to do things, they must not just talk about it, and the evaluation standard must also be the equal prosperity index of the people under their jurisdiction, rather than creating all kinds of auspiciousness, fabricating all kinds of lies, engaging in anything to whitewash the peace, setting a new record for creating the so-called peaceful and prosperous era, fooling the leader to be the so-called holy monarch, and then taking this as his own merit and writing it into the historical record. ”

Although they are not required to be like Fan Zhongyan, "the worries of the world first, and the joy of the world after the world", nor do they expect them to "serve the people", "endure hardships first, and enjoy pleasures last", but at the very least, you can't eat a vegetarian meal and just get a salary and not work.

Those who were used as negative teaching materials included the prime ministers of the Northern Song Dynasty. One by one, they have a high salary of tens of millions, but they will only intrigue in the court, spit on the emperor's face, and take pleasure in interfering in the emperor's private affairs, exaggerating to the point that the emperor has to sleep with any concubine several times, and they have to care! even did something to pull the concubines out of the palace and get them away.

The top talents who came out of hundreds of millions of people in the country use their brains around an emperor all day long, and you can imagine what the world's major events will become.

The new norms clearly require the basic qualities that civil servants should have, so the "strict" evaluation method has naturally caused widespread controversy and resistance.

This is not the same as the reform system imposed in the previous revolutionary war stage, which was to be used to educate millions of future generations. If left unchecked, the well-to-do lifestyle of the Chinese literati since the Song Dynasty can be declared goodbye.

How can the literati class be able to achieve a superior status and a privilege beyond the law?

They were expecting to resume this "tradition" step by step after the overall situation in the country was stabilized, but it turned out that the head of state was really interested in playing with equality before the law and not discussing the rule of law.

As a result, it did not take long for the controversy to form a breakthrough in the scope of the controversy, and soon spread to the arguments that the wise and the foolish, the hard-working should govern people, and the cultured people must be higher than the laborers, and so on. Inside and out, it echoes the traditional distinction between agriculture and industry, and even the aristocrats, landlords, and gentry of the world's great powers, who must be nobler than ordinary people.

In the final analysis, it is still required that the sentence not be a sergeant.

At the peak of the controversy, it called for a change in the current political system of one leader and two parties, to learn from the European powers to play with a constitutional monarchy, to invite the head of state to ascend the throne and to assume the throne, to reopen the Forbidden City as an imperial palace, and to turn the republic into an empire.

Public opinion has naturally pushed to this point, and no one feels that there is any problem, but only a few people at the top know that this is an absolutely untouchable red line, and whoever steps on it is unlucky. The Great Führer waited for them to jump into this trap.

So, when the controversy reached its most outrageous in September, he immediately wiped out a large group of people who were the most happy on charges of violating the constitution and deliberately destroying the republic!

When agents from the Ministry of State Security came to the door to arrest someone. All the Qingliu bigwigs and literati leaders are all blindfolded. This Nima is not right! We are passionate and loyal. It's all for the good of the Great Führer. How can you catch us? There must be a mistake!

Then I found out that it was right, and it was they who were arrested. The articles they wrote, the speeches they made, the rallies they held on various occasions, and the acts of inciting and organizing a large number of people to besiege government organs and propaganda units were all illegal and unconstitutional, and the evidence was conclusive.

Governing the country according to law, no one can open the net. It hasn't been long since the end of the national land reform. The scene of cutting people's heads back then is still vivid, and not many people dare to jump out and ask for extrajudicial mercy - people who have that kind of thinking are now the targets of arrest.

Then these people felt in their hearts that it wouldn't be so easy to deal with if they caught us, right? We are all the heads of public opinion and propaganda in the world, the so-called leaders of Shilin, celebrities who must be respected by hundreds of millions of people, and if we are caught in this way, we are not afraid of causing widespread opposition and condemnation and ruining the national order?

But it's a pity that they dare to jump out and cry out for them. There are very few people who question the government's decisions. The broad masses of the people. Only a handful of old literati and some of the gentry in the cities came forward to question why the legislature at all levels of government had done this. But if you want to say that the teachers will move the people and set off a tide of opposition, there are cliffs.

The leader of the Qingliu and the leader of the literati were dumbfounded, how could this be?

In the past few months, many of their remarks have been published through newspapers, and the people who have seen them do not know how many, how can they really respond to them, and the vast number of hundreds of millions of people have no conscience at all? Where is their discernment?

Many people speculate that it is likely that countless people with conscience wanted to come out and cry out for grievances, but they were ruthlessly suppressed.

But the truth is that the various jumps of these people in the past few months have actually had a very limited scope of influence. Their articles and remarks are mainly in the cities, and the only people who can understand or pay attention to them are the old-style literati with less than one-tenth of the population. Combined, there can be millions of deaths.

The broad masses of the people, the four or five hundred million people, the people in the rural areas and the major factories, either do not see their newspapers at all, or simply cannot read the Chinese written by them.

The cable and wireless radio stations that can really influence everyone are all directly under the Ministry of Culture and Propaganda, which is personally controlled by the Great Führer. was originally the mouthpiece of the world's public opinion as the head of state, how could it be used by these guys!

So, in the final analysis, it was a big show, but the poor guys fell for it, and so many people jumped out at once, all of them were recorded in the little black book, and then they were arrested and prosecuted in accordance with the law.

The result is very shocking, the whole country combined, at least 100,000 people can reach the justice, and the lightest must be pulled to talk and educate.

The circumstances are extremely serious and the impact is extremely bad, that is, Zhang Peilun, Wen Tingshi, Yang Du and other leaders. Zhang Jian, as a newspaper legal person and financier, naturally couldn't escape.

Just when they thought they might be killed as rebels and thieves, they wrote desperate poems with a sigh from the chief of the detention department, or shouted and cursed with righteous indignation, preparing to give a final speech before being beheaded or shot in the future. Suddenly, they heard a decision that left them dumbfounded.

Everyone, regardless of the severity of the circumstances, was assigned to the frontier to settle and contribute. This is not to go to prison or to serve a prison sentence, but to give them the opportunity to educate the barbarians and promote Chinese culture. If you want to come back, you have to complete the corresponding contribution value. That is, as many border people as they can educate and understand Chinese culture, they can redeem as many points. If you have enough, you can go back to your hometown. If you don't make up enough, you will die there.

Since ancient times, haven't Confucian scholars been shouting all day long for edification? From ancient times to the present, they have shouted for one or two thousand years, but they have not seen a few people who have really been educated, but they have educated the people of their own country to lose the spirit of resistance, and they have killed one stubble after another for the barbarian Hulu.

This time, the head of state finally gave them a chance, and hundreds of thousands of literati and talents went to the frontier to play education together, and they were not allowed to come back.

This is already an extrajudicial favor, and it can't be better. It's better than putting them in jail and eating with a bunch of mud-legged people, right? If they really follow the labor camp together, they can commit suicide by hitting the wall in shame.

Moreover, as long as they go to the frontier, they can be regarded as having a glamorous name for "responding to the government's call", although not voluntary, they will not be humiliated. When they really arrived at the frontier, they were all high-level top cultural masters, and those barbarian turtles still had to be offered like their ancestors?

Better than in other stages in history, they don't have to worry about being killed by the barbarians, digging out their hearts and livers. The frontier construction corps and hundreds of thousands of troops pressed the formation, and only they had the share of whipping people. When the sinicization of the frontier is completely completed, they still have a chance to set up a monument and go down in history.

There is no choice at all, Zhang Peilun and Wen Tingshi, two old Qingliu in their sixties, with a large group of young Zhuang factions in their forties and fifties, and a small number of young backbones like Yang Du, who are thirty years old, are fierce and ready to pedal west.

When I arrived at the train station, a few people couldn't help but feel sad, and the old tears fell down.

Looking at the heavy troops on the platform, a group of "reading seeds" dragged their families on the train, Zhang Peilun sighed with infinite emotion: "I can't imagine that below a thousand years, our saint disciples will have this calamity. I knew today, why did I have to worry about it at the beginning? In vain, the foundation of the Heavenly Religion has been damaged, so that later generations will not know the true meaning of our Chinese scholarship. There is no saint and no humanity, and neither are our sins! ”

Well, in his opinion, the great head of state's implementation of the cultural model that almost erased Cheng Zhu's science is simply a heretical doctrine, and to promote the world's education and people's hearts is to cut off the root of Confucius and Mencius.

Wen Tingshi clenched his fists indignantly, gritted his teeth and said, "The inheritance of the ages, how can it be broken because of us?" As long as there is a breath left, we will fight to the end! What about Western Xinjiang? It's not that tens of millions of immigrants will have to go there, as long as we cultivate a few more decent talents in our lifetime, we will one day cheer up. ”

He turned his head to stare at Yang Du and said solemnly: "Xizi, you are still young, you have time, and when you return in a few years, you will also be successful in academics." And the people of the world will also see clearly the truth and falsehood of those pseudo-learning, which is just a hit, so that they can see the style of orthodox Taoism such as ours. ”

The people next to him nodded in agreement: "Yes! Right! At present, the vulgar stream is full of government and opposition, the flowers are charming, and the people's hearts are dull, and I am afraid that they will not be able to distinguish it. They have to really see the harm before they know the benefits of our true academics. At that time, it is easy to promote it again. ”

cheered each other up like this, and the feeling of sad parting was much smaller.

Zhang Peilun and the others wiped away their old tears, turned around and hurriedly bowed their hands to a short and fat official with a short figure opposite, and said with a cold face: "Let's get in the car, Lord Yuan doesn't have to bother staring." Hmph, I misjudged you in the first place! ”

That Humpty Dumpty man is none other than Yuan Shikai. (To be continued.) )