Shuimu Network Law | Lao Dongyan: My 2024, Learning to Start Over

About the author: Lao Dongyan, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the School of Law, Tsinghua University.

一

For me, 2024 is a year of self-healing, and also a year of re-understanding myself and starting anew. After experiencing the broken state of mind in 2022 and 2023, I have finally recovered some vitality.

In my past life, 2022 can be called a turning point, completely breaking my original understanding, and I no longer have illusions about many things. Looking back, that wishful thinking was once the inner driving force for my efforts in my career, and it also gave me an incurable optimism about the future. In an instant, everything that had been constructed in my inner world collapsed, giving me a strong sense of disillusionment.

Fortunately, it was not until this age that I faced the sense of disillusionment. Before that, I had always lived naively and positively. Unfortunately, at this age, I still have to experience the sense of disillusionment, struggling with the choice of either giving up or starting anew, and needing to carry out self-rescue. I am no longer young, but I am not old enough, and I am indeed unwilling to spend the rest of my life in the state of lying flat and the so-called open-mindedness, which is actually cynicism.

I spent a large part of 2024 in Toronto, using the academic leave I had saved for eight years. Previously, I couldn’t wait to change the environment, because my state was so bad that besides reluctantly handling my teaching affairs, I simply didn’t have the energy to do anything else, including academic research. I felt that everything I did was meaningless.

Changing the environment itself is part of self-healing. In Toronto, I lived a secluded life, with a two-point or three-point line every day, hardly any social interaction, and no interest in traveling. Fortunately, my condition has improved, and my state of mind has gradually come out of the gloom and brokenness. I began to barely find the meaning of doing things, suppressed the occasional anxiety and frustration, and also wrote several academic papers, which can be considered as an explanation for this year’s visit.

二

In addition to self-healing, the past 2024 was also a year of re-understanding myself.

In terms of my own career development, from everything going smoothly to almost everything being frustrated, the superficial reason seems to be that I expressed some opinions in the public domain that were contrary to the mainstream, but the real reason is that I did not conform to the main theme of the times. I haven’t changed, only the tone of the times has changed.

When the tone of the times does not match the individual’s value structure, the friction of that incompatibility inevitably leads people into a dull pain and helplessness. The pain is not sharp, and the helplessness is not yet to the point of despair, but because the process is long, it is easy to wear down one’s will. Being in the situation, such a persistent and seemingly endless consumption will make sinking have great appeal: choosing to sink and no longer adhere to oneself can quickly eliminate the pain of incompatibility, similar to the battle between Don Quixote and the windmills, in the case of no hope of winning, it is better to simply surrender and give up.

The problem is that I can’t convince myself to give up. Therefore, I need to spend a lot of effort just to keep myself from being changed. Therefore, when I read the following words in the book “The Vastness of the Human World” written by Pengpai News: “Seeing how much danger a person has to take to refuse the fate of the soul’s fall, and what kind of courage, determination and luck a person must have to retain the good humanity on their body”, I felt particularly sympathetic.

In daily life, I can be called a low-key and humble person, but my image on the Internet is quite different. In the past 2024, two friends frankly pointed this out to me, one was a friend of many years, and the other was a friend I met for the first time, who had done many years of united front work and should have a lot of experience in judging people.

To be honest, before this, I was not aware of the difference between the two images in life and on the Internet. Whether in life or on the Internet, I try to be sincere and do not deliberately pretend to be any kind of person, nor do I use empty words to say things that I do not agree with. Between the two images, which one is more like the real me? It seems that both are the real me, but they represent different aspects.

For many years, when I encountered all kinds of unsatisfactory things, I was accustomed to first seeking from myself, reflecting on whether I had done something wrong or not well. This habit of reflection, until a few years ago, I saw a paragraph in an article by Liu Qing on March 8th, which meant that women’s excessive reflection in their work is not conducive to building sufficient self-confidence, and then I consciously made some adjustments. I do not lack self-confidence, but I have indeed found that being low-key and humble makes others underestimate my strength (especially women often appear to lack self-confidence), and in the eyes of some people, being low-key and humble is a synonym for weakness and being bullied. Therefore, now I may be more inclined to different positions, just like Sister Cha said in a public account article: “Non-essential not to reflect, reflecting on oneself usually only leaves room for others to go too far.”

However, the difference between the two images makes me reflect on whether it is due to my innate personality, or mainly because I am a woman, knowing that a high-profile image is not welcome in this society, so in the process of socialization, I gradually self-regulated, cultivated the characteristics of being low-key and humble, so as to make myself look less out of place, and at the same time try to avoid unnecessary harm. Asking myself, I really didn’t have such a strong mentality when I was young, able to not care about how others see me, and not care whether the people around me like me.

In the past 2024, I experienced a higher degree of organized cyber violence than before. It is undeniable that such cyber violence will cause some interference to me, but it is not as serious as expected. Some things often seem terrible before experiencing them, but after experiencing them, you will find that it is nothing more than that, and then you will find that you still have quite valuable qualities, that is, a relatively strong psychological endurance. Such a discovery is really surprising, and it is also a process of re-understanding myself.

After experiencing the last cyber violence, now I am chased and scolded by many people online, and I can remain calm, which hardly affects my mood, let alone harm. At this time, I will find that my ability to withstand scolding is quite strong, and the potential of people is truly unlimited. It can be confirmed that the next cyber violence of the same degree cannot harm me again. Cyber violence remarks, if you can do not take it to heart and not get entangled, you can minimize the negative impact.

三

The past 2024 is also a year of starting anew.

Over the years, I have become increasingly clear that I am not a pure scholar, I am more interested in social governance, and the corresponding research also hopes to be embedded in the framework of good laws and good governance. Law is a discipline that is used to govern the world, and I find it difficult to get enough fun and motivation from pure academic research. Because doing things requires a sense of meaning, when the sense of meaning is lost, I will also seriously lack the motivation to do things. If effort is meaningless at all, why bother to work hard? I couldn’t help but ask such a question.

Since graduating with a doctorate in 2004 and taking up a teaching position, there has never been a year like 2022 and 2023 that made me lose the motivation to do academic research. For more than a year and a half, I was trapped in the emotions of anxiety, frustration, and depression, and I had no mood to read professional books, let alone write academic papers.

The paper on the crime of buying and selling women, which I reluctantly completed in 2022, I had originally decided to give up when the deadline for submission came. The persuasion of a respected senior and friend changed my mind.

He said to me in a rare serious tone: Dongyan, you should not treat this paper as an ordinary commissioned article. The case of the chained woman in Feng County will definitely become a historical event. The Chinese criminal law community needs to express its position on the issue of the crime of buying and selling abducted women. If you do not submit this paper, in the future, looking back on the beginning and end of this incident, it will be considered that the mainstream view of the criminal law community is that there is no problem with the legislative theory and legal interest theory of this crime. At the last moment, I finally submitted the paper.

This paper was almost completed by me with the last of my strength at the time. After that, for at least another year, due to the loss of inner motivation, my condition became worse and worse. The turning point came from writing a paper on cyber violence. At that time, I had already gone to the University of Toronto for a visit. The change of environment allowed me to calm down and complete the article “The Basic Position of Criminal Law Governance of Cyber Violence”. After that, my research state improved, and I wrote several series of papers on the crime of illegal business operations.

I have always been more interested in the research of basic criminal law theory, because it is more theoretically challenging and can better demonstrate my advantages in research ability. Adjusting the research topic, turning to focus on more realistic and more specific issues, and emphasizing practical application in writing, is a self-positioning made in the process of re-finding a sense of meaning: if you can’t affect the big picture, it’s good to be able to affect the handling of one or two specific cases.

After the publication of the series of papers on the crime of illegal business operations, a lawyer told me that he used the arguments in my article in the defense of related cases. Another Shanghai judge told me that they recently ruled a case of illegal business operations, which was the same as the views in my article, and also believed that there was an attempt state in the crime of illegal business operations, and gave a lenient punishment to the defendant involved.

It is still difficult to say that I have truly come out of the dark and broken state of mind before. However, after trying to learn to look at myself with a historical perspective, and giving up the obsession with real results, I have indeed gained a certain degree of liberation. In any case, if you want to avoid falling into a state of learned helplessness, you should still choose to continue to make efforts and make the necessary efforts where you can. Making efforts itself is to strive for a hope of change.

The greatest comfort in the past year is that the interaction with people outside the legal circle has made me discover that people in different fields have similar concerns about society, and are still making their own efforts in different ways; those scattered stars of light are the hope of the future.

Finally, I will end the summary of 2024 with a paragraph from Wu Xiaobo’s New Year’s speech, which made me burst into tears after reading it:

Sometimes, the world is full of malice, but it doesn’t prevent us from still being kind;

Sometimes, the world is surrounded by vulgarity, and the laughter of clowns echoes in every corner, but it doesn’t prevent us from still having the courage to think independently;

Sometimes, the world’s hostility can be suffocating and despairing, but it doesn’t prevent us from still yearning for the sunshine of tomorrow;

Sometimes, this world will only applaud the powerful, but it doesn’t prevent us from still believing in the faith of morality and the power of the people;

Sometimes, we will feel powerless, no matter how hard you try, you may get nothing, but it doesn’t prevent us from still making progress every day, and our efforts will not be in vain;

Sometimes, ordinary and weak as you and I, we will also be as stubborn as a Sisyphus.

January 1, 2025

Completed in the Xijing residence