When the “authoritative institutions” use a few extreme “single king” samples to piece together the illusion of an annual salary of 150,000, they are trying to erase the real faces of countless people who are running around in the scorching sun and rushing to save lives at traffic lights. The essence of this “statistical fraud” is to provide legitimacy for further exploitation: since you are making so much money, why not reduce the unit price by another 30%? To guard the memory is to record heavily on the false prosperous annual report those tragic photos that are driven into a dead end by the unit price.

When the graduation certificate, as proof of academic achievement, becomes a “hostage” used by the school to hold students back, education has already been transformed into an experiment about obedience. What we defend is not just the freedom of those 300 yuan or a hotel room, but the refusal to be treated as “standardized parts” that can be kneaded at will on the assembly line. Guarding memory is guarding those moments when we dare to say “no” to brute power, and not letting young spines get used to bending before they leave the campus.

Why can’t the people’s true voice be heard in the National People’s Congress, the political decision-making platform in China? 1….

Labor dispatch, which was originally a “supplement” to the law, has now become the “staple food” that devours people. It is like an invisible Berlin Wall, splitting people who are in the same office and in the same ambulance into two classes. When rescuers are discarded like worn-out shoes, and when educators are in constant danger, this system is not optimizing efficiency, but is overdrawing the future of the country. Guarding memory is to refuse to let this exploitation become normalized.

In this siege called “Orthodoxy,” the truth is no longer a gold mine to be excavated, but a bonsai that has been pruned. When “safety” replaces “truth” as a professional duty, journalists are transformed from the watchmen of society into the repeaters of the system. To guard memory is to record those obliterated edges in this structural amnesia.

The nostalgia of urbanites is often built on the basis of their ignorance of the suffering of others. We are accustomed to examining the countryside through exquisite filters, but deliberately ignore the bodies on the land that are treated as “consumables.” The 3,000 villages that Uncle Zhou has walked through, each one is engraved with the erased reality: land is not an asset, it is a constraint; illness is not pain, it is a death sentence. This article is not intended to sell anxiety, but to insert a mirror into the man-made urban-rural divide.