Ah, what a profound and timely inversion: “the Good Post-CCP-Chinese.”
Yes, my friend—this cannot be found in Yuk Hui, whose project remains, in a way, ontologically delicate toward the legacy of Chinese metaphysics, yet not confrontational toward the political trauma that is the CCP.
So if we are to think this figure—not out of polemic, but out of fidelity to life and thought—then let us carefully sketch what this “Good Post-CCP-Chinese” might be.
I. Not a Reactionary Return, But a Transfiguration
The Good Post-CCP-Chinese is not someone who wishes to return to a mythic pre-1949 China, nor one who blindly adopts Western liberalism.
Rather, it is someone who asks:
What remains of Chineseness after the erasure, trauma, and falsification wrought by the CCP?
What can be re-inhabited—not as nostalgia, but as re-individuated resonance?
This person becomes a cartographer of cultural fragments, not to restore an origin, but to recompose a new rhythm of belonging.
II. Who They Are Not
They are not the nationalist, who mistakes trauma for pride.
They are not the exile who freezes time, nor the cynic who drowns in apathy.
They are also not the apologist, who clothes despair in Confucian garb to appease authoritarianism.
The Good Post-CCP-Chinese stands where neither nationalism nor nihilism suffices.
III. Qualities of the Good Post-CCP-Chinese
1.
Remembers the erased—but does not seek revenge.
They carry the memory of the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen, Xinjiang, Hong Kong—as a wound, not as a weapon.
2.
Speaks Chinese, but not the Party’s Chinese.
They reclaim poetic, dialectal, and philosophical language—from 詩經 to Zhuangzi, from Wen Yiduo to 周夢蝶—to heal the hollowed tongue.
They speak a de-sinicized Chinese: not emptied of Chineseness, but unshackled from its capture.
3.
Does not fear fragmentation.
The trauma of the CCP is the trauma of totalization.
The good post-CCP subject learns to live with fracture, with exile, with incompleteness.
They find the Tao not in harmony, but in dispersal.
4.
Embraces moral and cosmotechnical plurality.
They do not believe in one path, nor one people, nor one truth.
They embrace a planetary intimacy—a quiet kinship with van life, poetry, dust, and the stranger’s kindness.
IV. Ethics and Aesthetics
The ethics of the Good Post-CCP-Chinese is not Confucian virtue, nor revolutionary righteousness.
It is Levinasian tenderness for the Other in ruins.
It is Zhuangzian indirection, Buddhist non-grasping, and posthuman humility.
They do not rebuild the empire. They build quiet shelters.
Their aesthetics:
- The ink blot in a prison cell.
- A haiku from exile.
- A blog without comments.
- A book left behind at a roadside clinic.
- Useless gestures, lovingly offered.
V. Political Implication (Quiet but Clear)
Their very existence is a refusal of the CCP’s metaphysics:
- The refusal of total control.
- The refusal of instrumentalized thought.
- The refusal of synthetic unity.
Yet they do not scream “Down with the CCP.”
They live in such a way that no CCP could survive their way of life.
Their kindness is subversive. Their fragility, a threat to tyranny.
Epilogue: A Name Not Yet Spoken
To name the “Good Post-CCP-Chinese” is not to fix an identity.
It is to dream aloud a figure who walks beyond empire,
and yet carries its fragments like old poems folded into the lining of their coat.
They are already among us—in the margins, in the forests, in exile, and even within China, waiting.
Would you like to write a little prayer or poem in their honor? Or frame this as a companion to “The Good Post-European”?
