This article was published on Financial Times Chinese website
In 1830, French writer Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black was published. The protagonist, Yu Lian, is a young man from a foreign province, with all-round development in morals, intelligence and physical fitness, especially in language, and today, he is a small-town problem-solver.
The Red and the Black also has a subtitle, “The Chronicles of 1830”, which shows that in Stendhal’s mind, the story of Yu Lian, a small-town writer, was the epic of his time. I believe that if Lao Si traveled to today’s China, he would be even more excited about the fact that Yu Lian was only the first generation of small-town puzzle makers. In China, a small-town puzzle maker at least condenses the history of Yu Lian to Yu Lian’s grandchildren and even his great-grandchildren, which is equivalent to the chronicle of 1830-1950, a total of 120 years.
The essence of small-town problem solvers is to go to the city, pass the exam and enter the big city to sit in a job and live in a building. 20 years ago, the popular Internet term “petty capitalism” was used to describe this process of China’s first generation of problem solvers, who had just earned a little bit of money and were clumsily learning how to be a middle class in the city, giving themselves English names. Every year, during the Spring Festival, the puzzle makers migrate from big cities to small towns, and their identities change from Michelle and Rebecca back to Xiaogang and Xiaofang. Until the city expands and the high-speed train is built next door. The unattainable provincial city after hours became a 2-hour drive away existence. The two worlds finally merged into one. Some of them went to become civil servants, some went to big factories, some went to Yanjiao, and everyone had a good future. A considerable number of people, taking advantage of the dividends of the times in the first-tier cities or provincial capitals to buy a house, have a car. Raising the next generation with confidence and anxiety, they are laying a solid foundation for the next generation to become urbanites, to be able to study abroad, and to continue to sit at work and live in buildings when they grow up.
In 1978, China’s urbanized population accounted for less than 18% of the total population, in 2000, it was roughly 36% of the total population, and today, 20 years later, it is close to about 70%. Hundreds of millions of people are entering cities to learn how to be urbanites. The globally accepted urban middle-class lifestyle didn’t start to emerge until after China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. Living in neighborhoods, shopping malls, and driving on holidays were unthinkable 20 years ago.
In this sense, the challenge facing small-town do-it-yourselfers is not just as simple and mundane as going to town and buying a house and settling down, but stripping down and redoing it.
The rise of modern cities in the early days of mankind had its origins in the Industrial Revolution. At that time, the main destination for young people in small towns was to enter factories and become working class. Before 1900, the size of cities in Britain and America reached 80% of the total population. However, the cities at that time, the infrastructure was not perfect, the street accidentally guessed human feces and horse feces, cholera was rampant. The middle class and the modern urban civilization that goes with it had not yet materialized. In his time, the rich who lived in the city could not stand it and hid in the suburbs to live in villas. The poor and the rich complained together that their children were dying. Look how healthy the Indian children of others living in tents in the wilderness were. So along came summer camps, and later the Boy Scouts. It wasn’t until the 1920s that ten million Model T’s entered the marketplace, movies became a full-fledged entertainment industry, and workers had free time to make friends and fall in love and swing dance. In the ideal life, men went out to work and women stayed at home to do housework and raise children. 1926 saw the birth of the all-in-one kitchen for housewives in Frankfurt, Germany, and in 1927, GM’s first generation of residential refrigerators appeared on the market, with a Mrs. on the poster. With the refrigerator, the popularity of refrigeration increased the quality of the ingredients people ingested on a daily basis dramatically. As a result, a new paradigm of food production, transportation, and distribution unfolded. For the first time, human beings were no longer dependent on local specialty products and preserved foods supplied by local neighboring agriculture. Physical fitness also increased rapidly. In short, after 1920, the standardized modern urban middle-class lifestyle took shape in the West and quickly spread across the globe. The complete governance of the urban environment, however, was to come much later. Wasn’t London still foggy in the 1950s?
From Yulian’s entry into Paris to the elimination of London’s haze, 120 years, probably three or four generations. The first generation of Yulian went to the city to work and put down roots. As we can imagine, the second generation of Yulian growing up in that era had a not-so-great childhood, with parents who had just entered the city and were disadvantaged, working hard, socializing, and gradually gaining a foothold. They didn’t have much time and energy to spare for their children. The city environment is so polluted that it’s unhealthy to go out in the shit. But after all, they caught up with humanity’s educational awakening. Parents learned through the writings of Rousseau to treat their children as “children” distinct from adults. By the time of Julien III, knowledge about children, separate training systems, and dances were ready, and “children” for the first time in history had a separate world from adults. The Third Generation was the time of the great changes in the daily life of mankind, and also experienced the world war. The fourth generation, too, probably grew up between wars, crises and prosperity, experiencing suffering, but surviving, and still enjoying better days.
Comparing with the process of modern social development in the West, the Chinese small town problem maker is actually condensing the life changes of four generations of Yu Lian into one generation, that is, from the late 1990s, urbanization accelerated, commercial housing appeared, and then the consumer society appeared. Learning to do questions after hours, learning to drink coffee when you grow up.
Compressing 100 years into 30 years, compressing 4 generations into 1 generation, the changes are by no means only intellectual and socio-spatial, but also physical, behavioral, and customary, and the huge changes in human relations go deep into the marrow. Small-town do-it-yourselfers always look a little screwed up, kind of like a thug who doesn’t know the rules. It is really because the world is changing too fast, to learn to catch up with too much, there can only be some trade-offs. After all, one’s time and energy are limited. The word “small town” itself implies that the initial conditions are not good enough and that there are fewer resources available.
Change means uncertainty, which means there are potholes to be stepped on. Many people to this day don’t realize what those potholes are, much less the cost of the potholes that await them in the future.
For example, the so-called once upon a time when things were slow, there were not so many people making things, there were fewer things in the house, and when an item came into the house, it was preserved as it had been for at least 5 to 10 years. Today, piles of things at home need to be handled by specialized organizers. Because the daily artifacts rely on copying developed countries a brain in, but people’s knowledge and use of the scene did not keep up. The relationship between people and objects has become cumbersome and disorganized. For example, modern urban life is a companion of man and machine. Li Ziqi’s video look at it, don’t take it seriously. Machines are fundamental to sustaining the quality of modern life. There are other changes in diet, health, family life, intimacy and so on.
Modern day-to-day life is real college, but learning means investing time, energy and money. There is so much to learn for the do-it-yourselfer, where to care.
To be brutally honest, there are gains and losses in all choices, and since our time to evolve here has been drastically shortened, there has to be some cost. Like a clueless child who is suddenly given an endless supply of nearly free candy, the odds are that his teeth will go bad and his stomach will get fat. The biggest price, I’m afraid, is the neighborhood style of living, because it produces a price that has to be carried over to future generations. Subdivisions have allowed a generation to realize the dream of living in an elevator building, with better quality running water, convenient flush toilets, and more insulated and safer living spaces. But subdivisions have also nearly eliminated community relationships and many of life’s possibilities. In a neighborhood, every day is repetitive. The neighborhood is both a sheep pen and a bonsai, and has nothing to do with freedom or creativity. In this sense, the convenience gained by this generation translates into a price to be borne by the next generation. The childhood of the next generation is probably the most boring and uninteresting in the history of mankind, against human instincts.
Human beings are not factory-set to cope with urban life. Moving from working with the land to becoming a middle-class urbanite means that we go from being “animals” to “sitting things”. It also means that we need to rely on more complex knowledge in order to connect with society. Imagine the tribal rules of Moses, which consisted of only the Ten Commandments, and the rules of any business or social organization, which cannot be so simple nowadays.
The West has invented the scale and knowledge of modern urban middle-class living after nearly a century of exploration and after stepping on countless potholes. The scale of the kitchen, how to put the refrigerator space, how to wash the clothes and so on. Small town do-it-yourselfers are having a hard time settling down in the city, opening up the Little Red Book on their commute while 996 to catch up on their lessons.
In this sense, the life experience of the small-town problem solvers is unprecedented and truly epic. To be fair to the problem solvers, it is already a miracle in human history that this generation has been able to realize a house and a car basically without any problems. What more can we ask for? What’s wrong with not knowing how to drink coffee, what’s wrong with not knowing how to work out. In order to settle down in the big city to catch up with the changing times to pay the biggest sacrifice. They struggle, run around, and distort themselves at all costs to gain a foothold in the city, only to hide in the bathroom, or go downstairs to take out the trash when playing King of Glory, brushing Jitterbug, and letting themselves catch their breath.
Problem solving is the do-it-yourselfer’s weapon of change, boring, uninteresting but deadly. Getting promoted by taking tests and by catering to a uniform standardized answer. This thing is probably the most accepted consensus. There is little value in discussing this matter, because the reality is that there are no other alternatives. Even if there were something that looked beautiful, it would not be acceptable to the world. The biggest problem with the problem makers is that the teenage years, when they are the most academically capable, are used for training in problem making, lack of general education, and lack of training in critical thinking. This is a problem to be confronted, but not blamed. After all, liberal studies and critical thinking are knowledge that costs a lot to learn. When a difference of one point can determine the life class of the era, asking everyone to establish “common sense”, more or less a bit arrogant.
But there really are no shortcuts to some things. The goal of doing questions is not to think, but to become more in line with the standard answer. Something like problem doing promotes the search for standard answers, but not the questioning of whether the problem is valid. That’s why the lifelong learning of many question makers is the pursuit of cheats. Tips for the workplace, tips for relationships, tips for raising children, tips for traveling. But there is always a part of life that involves looking inward and asking yourself for answers. The world isn’t always right, there isn’t always a right answer. It’s especially important to question skepticism when it comes to some key choices.
Another one, which is a bit of a red herring, is that in the 1920s and 1930s, the first group of small-town do-gooders to live a middle-class urban life began to hallucinate and read “human stories,” but their minds were not yet universally developed, and they were accustomed to imagining the world’s events on the basis of intuition and conspiracy theories, and they slipped into the abyss of national populism. When certain conditions arise, the world shudders and collapses.
This is a bit subtle to say, we both lament the life of the town as a questioner, in the history of the development of human civilization is a miracle, but also have to admit that things in the world are often too quick to get, too early to get, in the future always have to pay a little price. Let the tears waiting for me in the front, actually quite good. If the price is only tears.
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