Beijing, Collective Ethics, and the Reclaiming of Judgment
I leaned back in my chair, my shoulders aching slightly from the release of tension. The cigarette had burned close to my knuckles; I tapped off the ash. The room was so quiet that only the rustling of an autumn night outside the window remained. And I suddenly realized that my drinking and writing tonight was, plainly speaking, an assertion of a very small but stubborn sovereignty—I refuse to be entirely taken by any narrative.
In his essay, Sartre describes Ivan’s situation as a kind of “freedom one is forced to shoulder.” The child has not yet grown up, yet fate has already pushed him into a position where he must choose. He must hate, must remember grudges, must act; otherwise he would be betraying his mother and the dead. For Sartre, this is almost the cruelest form of freedom—not choosing how to live, but choosing how to sacrifice.
That is freedom rising from the ruins, even if you are only a fourteen-year-old boy named Ivan. And my freedom is the permission I grant myself to sit in my room at dawn, allow myself to admit the day’s exhaustion, without packaging it into some historical mission. I allow myself to smoke simply because I want to, not because I need to strike the posture of a rebel. I allow myself to be forgiven—first and foremost by myself.
This freedom is gentle; it does not press a blade to my throat, demanding the confession of my choices or the repayment of their consequences. It is a small lamp whose flame spares me, in this moment, from being defined by the state, by history, by morality, by the gaze of others.
I am tired of “Ivan’s Childhood” as well; this is enough. Tarkovsky and Sartre are merely companions in my construction of subjectivity, while my gaze now shifts from Ivan’s childhood to another era—but one uncannily similar—my own childhood in Beijing.
My nostalgia has never been the cheap sentence “I miss my homeland.” In truth, I do not miss its structural reality. What I long for is something I myself have later idealized: a collective sensibility that has already ceased to function.
The ethical framework I grew up in was never individualistic. It was not “Who am I? What do I like?” but rather “Who are we? What must we endure? How must we continue living together?” This “we” was not gentle. It was not romantic. In reality, it could be crude, repressive, suffocating—the force that lifts you from a chair and orders, “Stop thinking. Follow the instructions.” It was not always just, but it was effective. It prioritized the survival and stability of the collective, temporarily freezing the emotions, desires, and particularities of the individual. If I were to describe this logic in academic language, it would undoubtedly be dangerous: an absorption of the subject, a power structure dressed in moral rhetoric. Anyone who has lived in it understands; I am no stranger to its violence. Yet I must also confess something less morally clean: I still find myself aesthetically moved by it.
This is not nostalgia for its discipline, but nostalgia for the very specific, almost tactile sense of placement it once gave me. What did it feel like? Like many people packed into a not-quite-warm cafeteria in winter, sharing the same dish, and whoever reached for the last piece of meat would pretend to offer it to someone else. Its core was simple—you were not alone, at least not publicly so.
This is difficult to reject entirely. Even after I left, even after so many years passed before I could admit honestly that such a collective was not merely warm but also demanded the sacrifice of the self and the maintenance of silence, I still cannot place it wholly in the category of “evil.” Because the truth is, within the structure of my early years, it offered a sense of direction. It asked me to stand on a certain line, and as long as I remained on that line, I was recognized morally. It was a crude morality, even a cheap one, yet as a child I took pride in it. I would step back from my own needs just to earn a red scarf on my collar, to hear them say I was “sensible.” What a filthy word, and at the same time what a moving one. It demands obedience yet disguises itself as maturity; it conceals personal grievance yet rewards you with another identity—you are trustworthy, after all, for “Young Pioneers never lie.” That was my earliest experience of moral satisfaction, rather than freedom.
Now, of course, I can analyze it critically. I can say it habituates people to regard repression as virtue, self-sacrifice as an inherent nobility; that from a young age one begins to internalize such discipline, as though keeping silent, refraining from asking, and suppressing desire were markers of dignity. I can analyze it this way, and indeed I have. But I no longer wish to pose as a cold critic. I will not pretend I have transcended all of this. In fact, even this small sovereignty of the night—this drink, this cigarette, this piece of writing, this posture that asks all public claims to wait outside—is itself a residue of that collective morality. I must admit I still carry that collectivized muscle memory. I still instinctively push myself forward, even though I no longer believe in the rhetoric of unconditional sacrifice. I still act in nearly the same way. I know it is a language of exploitation, yet at critical moments I continue to measure myself against it.
One might say: it is no longer a command, but it remains an aesthetic.
What I find aesthetic is a posture—people standing shoulder to shoulder, facing the same direction, silent, yet each carrying a small portion of the shared weight. That collective morality has long lost its governing power in reality, but it remains alive in my aesthetic sensibility. I do not want to erase it. When one tries too hard to negate everything old, one mistakes the negation for liberation. But negation is merely another form of being ruled by it, because you are still reacting to it, still having your actions determined by it, only in reverse. Transformation is never simply denying its existence, but acknowledging its role in shaping the subject—and then determining its meaning myself.
Pain is the same.
The past oppressions, the shame, the ethics that demanded silence—they are all part of my body now. And subjectivity arises precisely from recognizing that these traces are now under my command. Aesthetics is this gesture; it is not praise, not nostalgic beautification of the system. It is the power to place it within a frame. I make it something that can be viewed. I allow myself to look at that collectivist posture and acknowledge that it still moves me, still strikes me as dignified, solemn, human. But it is no longer law. It can no longer demand my sacrifice.
This is the faintest yet most authentic beginning of subjective freedom: it does not flee but confronts; it no longer obeys but defines. Even if such watching takes place only in the cracks, even if it still occurs under the shadow of the system, it remains freedom. This watching is also a moral watching, because I can acknowledge that the self is the only moral object. I am no longer merely a tool measured by the collective, but a being for whom I myself am responsible. When I am able to look freely upon that collective ethic—and even, in a certain manner, to aesthetically regard it—the axis of morality shifts back to me. I am the one who renders judgment.
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