Cheng Yizhong, one of the founders and former editor-in-chief of Southern Metropolis Daily and New Beijing News. Recipient of the UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize 2005. Born on April 4, 1965, a native of Huaining, Anhui Province, he graduated from the Chinese Language Department of Sun Yat-sen University in June 1989. From June 1989 to March 2006, he served in the Nanfang Daily and the Nanfang Newspaper and Media Group, where he served as: reporter and editor of the Literature and Arts Department of the Nanfang Daily; reporter of the Nanfang Daily's reporter station in Zhanjiang; deputy editor-in-chief of Nanfang Metropolis Newspaper of the Nanfang Daily Newspaper and Media Group; deputy managing editor of Nanfang Metropolis Newspaper; managing editor and editor-in-chief; director of the management committee of the Nanfang Metropolis Newspaper Department; and director of Southern Sports He has also served as a member of the Youth Federation of Guangdong Province, and as a member of the Youth Federation of Guangdong Province, and as a reporter and editor of the Literature and Arts Department of Nanfang Daily. He has also served as a member of the Youth Federation of Guangdong Province, a deputy to the People's Congress of Dongshan District, Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province, and vice president of the China (Beijing) Urban Newspaper Research Association.
    Southern Metropolis Daily and Beijing News are the ocean of my past, while Sports Illustrated Chinese Edition is the mulberry field of my present, no matter whether it's a ocean or a mulberry field, it's the place where I plow and harvest, and they direct my future together. Southern Metropolis Daily and New Beijing News, how to say? I've been in love with them too much, and I can't bear to see them. I've been there, I've been there, I've been there, I've been there, I've been there, I've been there. Now Southern Metropolis Daily and Beijing News are still my lighthouse, shining on my voyage. I don't want to poeticize my past.
    Except for emperors, idealists, revolutionaries and politicians, there is really no reason for people who have lived in Guangzhou for many years to like life in Beijing. I understand now why the emperor liked to go down to the south of the Yangtze River, why he built the Summer Palace and the Yuanmingyuan, and why he dug such a big sea. But I don't hate Beijing as much as some of my friends do. I think Guangzhou is like a mother and Beijing is like a father, and it's understandable that you are attached to your mother and rebellious to your father. The interesting thing about Guangzhou is that it is a civil society, a contractual spirit, and you can be somewhat less victimized by power and have a certain degree of autonomy in your own life. In Beijing, on the other hand, the most hateful thing is that power is everywhere, and people can't make fair deals with each other, and can't establish equality and mutual trust. The biggest thing I learned from coming to Beijing is that I have a more comprehensive understanding of China.
    Whether it is the sharpness of the past, or the patience and compromise of the present, I think it is all natural for me, not deliberate. I am extremely sensitive to the hardships of life, and I empathize with the injustice and unfairness inflicted on all people, and I am as cynical as I am hateful, so my sharpness has been sharpened, and if there is no injustice and unfairness in the world, how can I speak of my sharpness? The injustice of the world is my whetstone. And the so-called patience and compromise, there are only two kinds of situations, one is the sharpness is broken, the other is that you are out of time, you have lost the opportunity to show the sword.
    The life I despise most is the one that requires the selling of one's soul. For example, if one does not share a certain value but must live by it; if one betrays human common sense and universal values in order to live, wrestling with one's conscience or simply abandoning it in order to live; if one knows that a certain statement is a lie but says that it is the truth in order to live. The most intolerable thing is that this is done just to live a more successful life, and he has a life without it.
    Rather fortunately, I now have the autonomy to choose a lifestyle that is not humiliating, and although the cost is high, I feel it is worth it.
    To say that I am tired of it, I have actually had it for a long time, not just now. I had long since stopped wanting to put up with it, I had long since wanted to resign, as the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, as a newspaper man, I had been subjected to too much oppression and humiliation. It's just that the events that followed made my exodus look less like self-exile and more like a hasty escape.
    How can I be an optimist? I am an optimist because I am pessimistic to the core.
    If you are rich, you can help the whole world; if you are poor, you can do good to yourself. In this sense, like traditional Chinese readers throughout the ages, I have a strong sense of family and country in my bones, and a strong sense of serving the people. And I am engaged in a profession that has just such opportunities and possibilities. In a democratic country, these consciousnesses are not really important, but in China they are very precious.
    I hope that when I am 50 years old, I will be more tolerant and freer, I will not need to clap my hands and be angry, and I will be able to live in a society where human rights, democracy and the rule of law are truly realized, and I will be able to see that the officials are honest and clean, that the environment is getting better and better, that there is fairness and justice in society, and that the people are living in peace and working in contentment. As for how big a career one can have and how much one can achieve, it really does not matter at all. I am willing to be a happy civilian under a good system, and I definitely do not want to be a miserable hero under a bad system.
    Some people say that I myself and the Southern Metropolis Daily suffered setbacks because I am not smooth enough, exquisite, worldly, and do not abide by the unspoken rules, this view I firmly oppose. On the contrary, I should say that the most successful part of the Southern Metropolis Daily and the reason for its success is that I, Cheng Yizhong, am not smooth, delicate and worldly. More importantly, the greatest thing about Southern Metropolis Daily is its frustration.
    The biggest dregs of China is the so-called human learning, and what Chinese people lack is frankness and purity. China is full of all kinds of plausible and plausible learning to be a human being and official, vulgar management learning, whose grandmasters are thick black science and subterfuge. From these studies, all I see is a race to the bottom, creative shamelessness. I often feel a bit incredible, how so many teachings to be a person in the learning, do not teach people how to be a person of integrity, decency and moral righteousness, and in turn teach people how to be a smooth, worldly and do not suffer from the loss of a person.
    The worst reality is that the corruption of the system and the corruption of the national character are working together in this era. On the one hand, the corruption of the system has transformed and harmed the national character and aggravated its corruption, and on the other hand, the increasingly corrupted national character has also provided a fertile soil for the increasing corruption of the system, and both of them have become each other's successes, and are the cause and effect of each other, and they are also pushing each other's progress. But what is frightening is that we do not think of it, or we are not aware of it, just like a frog being boiled in warm water.
    I'm not angry now because I've mastered the two secret techniques for surviving in these times, absurdity and drama. I consider this to be the greatest uncompromising and uncompromising I can do. We are living in a time of drama, where rites and music are in tatters, and the river is going downhill, and it is hard to return. How can we live in such times without a little drama and absurdity; so I am no longer prone to outbursts of anger. I am ashamed that I am a little more indifferent to reality and passionate about myself.
    I find this statement embarrassing, I have no intention or ability to take on such a role, I am an idol destroyer and I refuse to be one. First of all, let it be clear that I don't think this issue has anything to do with me. I must say that I have always been very wary of things like spiritual godfathers and leadership. Leadership is something that is actually a temperament of violence for violence, nothing more than the successful crushing of one greater kind of violence over another, relatively smaller kind of violence. What I expect of myself is that my insights will be highly persuasive and actionable; that my claims will be recognized and supported, and will be reasonable; and that my planning will be efficiently turned into reality.
    Of course I also recognize that the more backward a country is the more it needs spiritual godfathers and leadership.
    The first question is a bit big and generalized. I can only say that in the past 100 years, the fate of intellectuals in mainland China has generally remained unchanged - no, it should be deteriorating. Although there are changes in material conditions, intellectuals have not really gained respect and dignity in the past 60 years; they have become less and less independent in personality, less and less free in academics, and their destiny of being bred and underwritten has not changed; on the contrary, they have become more and more attached and dependent on the powers that be. This is very sad! What is even more pathetic is that even the term "public intellectuals" has now become a term that is not allowed to be mentioned, how despicable! It is absurd that "public intellectuals" are not allowed, but only "private intellectuals"!
    Cheng Yizhong has often been asked, "Before 2005, you spent ten years founding two of China's best newspapers, the Southern Metropolis Daily and the Beijing Newspaper, and at one time you were running around in Guangzhou and Beijing, managing two news teams of more than 2,000 people, and now you've been convicted of a crime of speech and everything is back to zero, and you're managing a sports magazine with dozens of people, so the gap is so huge, aren't you reluctant to do it, don't you still have new plans?
    The people who ask these questions don't understand that a person who knows the true nature of his existence doesn't care how big a turf he sits in; sitting on a short stool doesn't make him any less free, and sitting on a leather couch doesn't make him any more free.
    There's a poem that says that sleeping anywhere is sleeping at night.
    This is not a state of depression, but rather a state of optimism, an optimism that realizes where one is and why one is there because of an insight into the tragedy of reality. This kind of optimism comes from frustration, which makes it particularly precious. For Cheng Yizhong, frustration is not a humiliation, and the only thing that frustration can humiliate you is that you automatically give up a dignified life in front of frustration and call it "smooth and worldly".

    Born in the hometown of Chen Duxiu and Hai Zi, this person still has an unceasing pursuit for the glory of media people, and the Chinese edition of Sports Illustrated is only his first attempt in another direction. It was only by chance that he joined the media after graduating from the Department of Chinese Language and Culture, but all these chances led to the inevitable, and the media became the way for him to obtain the value of his life. At the beginning of the founding of the Southern Metropolis Daily, he liked to recommend the movie "Shawshank Redemption" to those around him, which tells the story of institutional dilemma and spiritual redemption. Now, when he comes out from Shawshank's predestination, and stands on this new direction, his concern for the rights and well-being of the general public does not stop. In the midst of all the noise, he sometimes remembers Dr. Zhivag, "the empty countryside, the silent white night of the great age, the vast Russian wilderness, the stunned Zhivag reading poetry under the orange lamp, the woman sleeping soundly on the bed, the howling of wolves in the distance." He could not choose a life of refuge, a seemingly free escape; in the big time, he felt more Zhivago-style sadness and unceasing fervent hope.