我丁老端 (or, How to be a public intellectual in China, in five simple lessons!)

Duan Hongbin is snarking in high form on Weibo (original post here):

Lesson 1: Why become a public intellectual?

Simply put, you attract a lot of attention as a public intellectual. Your fans will increase geometrically. You can make a microblog post about there not being any toilet issue when you used the bathroom, and several thousand persons will forward, comment upon and share your post.

Secondly, you will be able to hold the moral high point. That is to say, you can curse and smear anyone you want, and your target won't be able to do a thing to refute. You may even have the privilege of "rumor mongering" at will without bearing any legal responsibility. If anyone tries to stop you, that person will be assaulting freedom of speech.

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Moreover, if you do your job well, the American Embassy may invite you over for tea. Maybe some democracy foundation will offer you a sizeable subsidy in American dollars.

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Lesson 2: The minimum requirements to become a public intellectual

With technological advances, the minimum requirements to become a public intellectual has reached historical lows. In terms of hardware, you only need a crappy computer and an Internet connection. In terms of software, you need to know the basic skills of typing, making comments, posting to blogs/microblogs, forwarding and using PhotoShop.

But you don't need to know too much about logic and reasoning. This is the reason why public intellectuals come mostly from the humanities. But you must know enough about psychology, because you must try to understand the attitudes of your fans: What do they want to read? What do they hate? What do they respect? What are they jealous of? If you don't even know about these things, you will be going naked into battle.

Lesson 3: Seven keywords for entry-level public intellectuals

In the past, it was necessary to read a lot of books and documents in order to become a public intellectual. But nowadays you only need to use seven keywords effectively in order to become an entry-level public intellectual. These seven keywords are:

1. Freedom
2. Democracy
3. Human rights
4. Political system
5. Constitutional politics
6. Vote
7. Universal value

As long as you keep bringing up these keywords in your blog/microblog posts, you are a public intellectual in form. To the ordinary Internet user, you have instantly acquired sufficient reasoning, you have transcended cheap vulgarity and you are a person with independent character and thinking. In your thinking, you need to be highly conscious that these seven keywords can solve every problem in China. You need to be totally convinced yourself before you can go out to convert others.

But it is not enough to invoke these keywords. You must also deploy them effectively. For example, there is the method of comparative shopping. So you must regularly compare China with USA. Here are some examples:

You went to the bathroom and you found that the toilet issues have run out. An ordinary Internet user would surely write: "Fuck! The tissues ran out just when I went to the restroom, damn!" A silly Internet user would write: "I went to use the restroom, but there were no more tissues. There must be something wrong with the way I use the restroom!" A photo would then be uploaded to show the situation. But as public intellectual, you cannot write that way. The proper way of writing is:

Chinese restrooms run out of toilet issues frequently. When I was in America, there was always toilet issues in the restrooms. What is wrong with our society? There must be a problem with our political system. Why are the expenditures for the restrooms not transparent? Where do the taxpayers' money go? Trillions are spent by government workers on eating and drinking, but they won't pay for a roll of toilet issue? I haven't even gotten into a detailed discussion of China-made toilet issues, because the inside story is too frightening ...

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Lesson 4: The self-improvement of a middle-level public intellectual

As a middle-level public intellectual, you need to promote your own ideas. But more importantly you need to deprecate everything about your opponents. There are three natural targets, and you can do no wrong when you debase them. These are:

1. Despotism
2. Totalitarianism
3. Tyranny

You need to mention these three words all the time, as if they are your most hated enemies. You denounce them day and night, year in and year out. Even if there is no provocation, you must bring them out for a thrashing.

The aforementioned are invisible enemies. But you may also have visible enemies, such as Internet users who make critical comments on your blog/microblog.

If this critic is young, you can call him an "angry young man," you tell him to go and read more books and you can ignore him thereafter.

If this critic supports a certain existing government policy, then you can do no wrong by calling him a "fifty-cent gang" member. You can add a rebuttal such as: "You get fifty cents to make a post, but will it help you to buy a house?" If this person persists, you tell him: "Running dog, you eat shit!" Then you blacklist him from reading/commenting your blog/microblog and you can ignore him afterward.

If this critic is nostalgic about the China 30 years ago under Mao, you can call him "Maoist leftie" and add: "How come your dad wasn't starved to death?"

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Actually, only entry-level public intellectuals go into debates themselves. Higher level public intellectuals will have a bunch of followers to carry out mass brawls. But you still need to learn these basic methods, just so you don't slip up in case you have to chime in.

Lesson 5. Public intellectuals must learn some psychology

A must-read book is Gustave LeBon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. As individuals, people can have low or high intelligence. As a crowd, people have relatively low intelligence. A crowd is immune to reason; it is only affected by "emotions."

With respect to motivating, mobilizing and inflaming crowds, no one is better than Mao Zedong. Peers are rivals, so Mao is the biggest enemy of public intellectuals. If you want to seize turf from Mao, you must thoroughly negate him. The good thing is that Mao is disadvantaged by the fact that he is dead. Nowadays young people won't bother to read Mao's works. Therefore their understanding of Mao is based upon your presentation. You are advantaged by the fact that Mao has transgressed against many people in his time, and so you will have countless allies who will provide you with free promotion.

When you want to go against the government, you need to use populism as your weapon in order to fuse with the netizens. But when your personal interests are in conflict with the people, you will negate populism totally and you invoke the rule-of-law and the inviolability of private property to defend yourself. For example, the government raises the salaries of public service workers and the state-owned enterprises are dispensing benefits to their employees. You must immediately attack them with populism. But when you are ready to divvy up state-owned properties among yourselves, you know that people won't be happy. So you drop populism and you promote the rule-of-law and private ownership. You tell the people that private ownership is the most efficient economic system.

Public intellectuals fall into different levels. Senior-level public intellectuals want to take every advantage within the system while pretending to the unpaid spokesperson for the people. But no matter what their levels, public intellectuals have the same goal: to pay the minimum price to procure the maximum public goods. So you should never criticize for the sake of criticizing. You must always remember to procure public goods from which to maximize profit.

Finally, I want to remind you that there are five things in the world that you can attack and smear at will: China; the Chinese government; the Chinese people; Chinese officials; Chinese state-owned enterprises. You can do no wrong no matter how you attack them; you will be able to seize the moral high point. But you must never provoke Fang Zhouzi. You can't complain that I didn't tell you. How can you be more awesome than Han Han?

Now that you have become a qualified public intellectual, I recommend that you apply your knowledge and write your first "public intellectual"-style blog post to condemn this society and gather fans. You may just be the next Han Han!