Transformation of national character is an unavoidable issue
The film "Untitled Remembering 1942 Project" is showing the scenes of great famine that occurred in central China from 1942 to 1943, reproducing the sufferings of the people that time. However, the audience burst out into laughter several times when seeing the smothery and tearful scenes like the withered people sell their children in order to survive, the country clergyman prays for people died of cold and hunger, a crying baby falls from its mother's arms and the Japanese planes bombs the innocent people.
The laughter sounded too harsh and at that moment the writer suddenly remembered that Chinese author Lu Xun had also been grieved and indignant about the similar laughter, which awakened Lu that doctors can cure the illness of people's body but do nothing about the numbness of their souls. Since then, Lu abandoned medicine for literature, using the pen to incisively dissect the deep-rooted bad habits of Chinese people.
Under the social environment of inflated material desire, the worship of money has swallowed the spirit, morality and even sympathy of people. What does the economic achievements made by China since the reform and opening up mean if not building sound social values as soon as possible and making efforts to correct all sorts of ridiculous and even reversed moral standards, so that our subsequent generations become greedy, indifferent and unsympathetic in the dirty social atmosphere.
It is still a problem that whether the national character of China should be changed, although it had been proposed by a large number of advanced Chinese people as early as the 1920s and 1930s. From the standard-bearers of the New Culture Movement including Lu Xun and Hu Shi to the earliest communists such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, they all thought the transformation of the national character of China is the key for China to move toward a modern power. The mental states of ignorance, backwardness, selfishness, indiscipline had made those respectable predecessors feel pained and grieved.
Recently, the public is talking about "Empty talks jeopardize a state while solid work revitalizes it." The writer thought that the prevalence of "false and empty talks" in improving the national quality and character will certainly lead to rampancy of the ineffective formalism and vulgar culture, making the requirement of imprinting "Empty talks jeopardize a state while solid work revitalizes it" in one's heart a wishful thinking and self-deception.
It is a challenge to the social development of China that educating the people with advanced culture, sound social norms and system o credibility and combining the outstanding traditional culture with the universally applicable standard of behavior to form a new national character.
Source:China Youth Daily Overseas Edition, author:Qin Xiaoyin
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