The Red Ocean
Allow me to tell you a story that resembles a horror tale, yet one that is true, a story that other Chinese people would not dare to tell. There exists an interesting phenomenon in Chinese history, that of regular periods of great extermination. Here are a few examples:
1. From 156 BC to 263 BC, the Chinese population went from 56 million to 8.2 million inhabitants;
2. Between 1122 and 1274, the number of inhabitants in China went from 93.47 million to 8.87 million, a decline of 91% of the total population;
3. From 1630 to 1651, the number of Chinese people went from 192.5 million to 25 million;
4. Between 1777 and 1786, China lost 110 million of its inhabitants;
5. Finally, from 1851 to 1863, China lost nearly 200 million people.
A few years ago, when I discovered that such periodic declines in population had occurred, I was horrified and found it hard to believe the truth of these facts. But numbers do not lie. Reality eventually catches up with fiction, as Joseph Conrad depicts in Heart of Darkness, our civilization is finally akin to that black hole at the bottom of the Congo River that the protagonist follows, where the light of civilization no longer shines. History is made up of hidden episodes, ones we do not know about. These figures concerning the number of deaths in China are akin to the massacres that took place in the Congo; nobody knew. And people lose all their identity, their individuality, to become one of the thousands, millions of dead. That is history. And is it only in China that such things can occur? I sometimes wonder how consumers immersed in the digital order have become the price of the march of history.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted such a scene in his Hunters in the Snow. The earth takes the form of a peaceful old man on which people play joyfully. And in a corner, hidden, is the gate to hell, hidden at the edge of a condemned house, for now, by stalactites. At first, I thought Bruegel was painting mythological stories, but as I grew older, I realized he was painting reality. During the thirty-year golden age that followed the Cold War, people enjoyed the dividends, globalization, and technological development, relying on various financial instruments to create a happy life in consumption. But with all this happiness, I remembered that people seem to forget what the most important parts of history are written on. What is ultimately remembered in history? How is it written?