Just two weeks away from the 60th Anniversary of the establishment of his motherland, for which he had such a deep love, indeed, the love impelled him going back to China right after he finished his postdoc research here at Northwestern University, to accept a starting faculty position at Zhejiang University, to persuade his wife rejecting the faculty position she got in the US to go back with him lest the family be split up and their 3-years old child can only see one of the parents, Dr Tu jumped off the top of the building in which he lived, and terminated his promising research career.

Our last encounter was almost half a year ago, one or two month before his departure for China. At that time, I was impressed by his smile that was always on his face and his politeness. And we chatted for a little while, as both of us are alumni from Tsinghua University, the conversation was very easy-going and a little bit nostalgic.

We say requiescat in pace to him, and hope him find peace in Heaven.

Pundits on TV screens, columnists in their little gardens of letters, professors on podiums, and independent writes in their blogs, quite a majority of these people keep saying that the trends of freedom and democracy cannot be stopped, as if these two intrinsically unrelated things, freedom, and democracy, were Siamese twins that cannot be separated, and you either get both or get none. It is not the truth at all. Not because they speak of them together so often, that they become glued together by their saliva. 自由民主 (freedom and democracy) is a fine word, like all the other words we Chinese people like to speak, made of four characters. People tend to treat it as of the same structure as 一生一世, but that’s just naive thinking, and I think it fits perfectly into another category of words such as: 九牛一毛 (nine bulls and one hair), 党和国家 (party and state), words in which the leading part is the predominant one and the trailing portion means really nothing.

Democracy by itself has no real value, strange this might sound to a lot of people who have been reciting the four-character spell of 自由民主 (freedom and democracy) for thousands of times without everthinking about the relationship between the two entities they so freely mix, its existence serves as a determent of evil things like dictator and authoritarian government. Yet, by rigging the ballot and using media to wash again the already heavily-washed brains of common folks, it can lose its only value as stated just too easily. After all, politicians really don’t give a fuck about how random guys on the street think. If the election is near the corner, maybe they will stage some shows of how close they go with John the plumber, but after the voting boxs are closed, come on, people, get out of my lawn!

Freedom, quite the contrary, is a beauty by and of itself. The freedom of speaking what you think, the freedom of sharing ideas with other people by organizing meetings and publishing pamplets, the freedom of doing whatever you feel up to in your own space without annoying other people, the freedom of moving to new places you like in your country as a free citizen, the freedom of keep silence when everybody else is ranting crazy words, the freedom of choosing a job which suits best both your interests and abilities, the freedom of criticizing the government without risk of being thrown into prison secretly, the freedom of having a trial in a court of justice. Living in modern China, we have so many different kinds of freedom to pursue, to fight for, to stick up to, to stand behind, I just can’t understand why so many people are wasting their time and energy in risking their necks for democracy, which has never been proved a good thing to have in the first place and which the vested interests cannot bear.

So I say, our strategy should be  this: ditch democracy, fight for freedom, and one by one, we can turn China into the land of the free. Sixty years ago, our fathers fighted to their death to free us from invaders. Sixty years has passed, which is treated as a cycle of time in Chinese calendar, yet we haven’t gotten the basic freedom yet, though they have been in our Constitution for nearly sixty years. How weak are we, how shameless are we, how stupid are we, that we can boast our bravery of street fights, of domestic violence, of beating our own children, yet we cannot stand up and get the basic freedoms, which we long deserved and has been deprived of us for sixty years.