Saturday, December 10, 2005

Moral Collapse of Chinese Intellectuals

The scandal that a Fudan University graduate tortured dozens of cats generated intensive discussion on the Chinese Internet community, with the great majority strongly condemned the crime, and asked for legislature on animal cruelty. However, there are also voices that this is no more than a misdemeanor, and that it shouldn't have been such a big deal. Specifically, some people argued that there were illiterate country workers who catch and eat cats everyday without drawing this kind of attention, and that Liangliang Zhang being a college student should not be treated differently.

When Liangliang Zhang's father Baihe Zhang receive an interview with East Morning, he emphasised that he's a senior intellectual, and that there was huge pressure of being a senior intellectual. He apparently thinks being an intellectual justifies ZLL behaving as a sub-human. This is not only disgusting, but also a shame of the Chinese society.

The 'intellectuals' are used to be the conscience of the society throughout Chinese civilization, until after the 1949, when Chairman Mao told them that they need to study from the proletariat. It was used as a way to humiliate the intellectuals, but now they are so used to it, that they no longer feel ashamed of it. They even started to make excuses out of it.

The society used to have a higher bar for intellectuals on always every aspects of social life, not to say count on them in time of adversity of the country. See what are they doing now? Doctors take kickback from salesmen, teachers exchange grades for money, college students torture kittens for fun.

We need to bring back the self esteem and pride of being an intellectual, and we can only achieve that before we correct what we did wrong. We should no longer play the trick of being a sub-proletariat to get away from behaving like a sub-human. We also should no longer sit indifferently when one of us doing just that.

Fudan Scissorhands, Fudan Scissorhands Update

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