The great tide of the world surges onward: those who follow it flourish, and those who resist it perish. Social development has its own laws. We should work to understand and use those laws instead of imagining we can change them. In everyday life, this means we should stop constantly trying to protect things that lack vitality. When something needs to be carefully protected, that shows it has already lost its vitality, while things with vitality are growing wild.

Take the protection of old towns and villages. When you visit them, you discover that these so-called old towns have actually become commercial streets with traditional decorative elements, rather than authentic old towns. The old towns you can see are merely part of modern real estate, tourism, and the film industry. As for the real old towns, their residents left long ago, and some have been reduced to broken walls and ruins.

Or consider intangible cultural heritage. Everything that needs vigorous protection, such as carved lacquer, traditional theater, paper cutting, dragon boats, and martial arts, is a white elephant: not enjoyable enough to keep, yet a shame to discard. Either the cost is extremely high or better substitutes have long been available. Without government publicity, many people probably would never even have heard of them. Meanwhile, intangible heritage that needs no protection, such as the techniques for making Moutai liquor or tofu, has long been growing wild in the market and has become an inseparable part of modern society. It needs nobody's protection, and nobody could be arrogant enough to declare that they would protect it.

Take regional languages. The loudest calls to protect them concern Wu Chinese, yet local people in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai hardly speak it anymore. The reason is simple: it is not widely understood. People from other provinces cannot understand your hometown speech, and it may stop being useful before you have even left your city. By contrast, Sichuanese and Cantonese are spoken not only in their home provinces but across China and even around the world. With so many speakers, there is no need to emphasize protection; people will naturally study and promote them.

Or take animals. Animals on the verge of extinction all conflict in some way with the development of modern society. There used to be many jackals, wolves, tigers, and leopards on the Central Plains, but they later became endangered or extinct. We now talk of protecting them, yet in practice this merely means keeping their species alive in zoos and reserves. Their former homes no longer have room for them. By contrast, the numbers of chickens, ducks, pigs, and cattle exploded in the industrial age and have already surpassed the human population. Forget protection: even if all humanity united with the express intention of wiping them out, it would be an arduous task.

Likewise, social ideas constantly change. Do not yearn for the ideas of the past. No idea or belief is sacred; it all depends on whether it fits your present circumstances.

I am not opposed to protecting these things. Quite the contrary: friends who know me know that I love history and detest people who destroy cultural relics and historic sites. But I want to preserve these historical materials for study, rather than bring them back to life and into our everyday existence.

I always follow the words of our mentor Engels: these things should be put where they belong, in the museum of antiquities, alongside the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.

Leave the things that need protection to governments and scholars. We should pay more attention to what is growing wild, because those things truly have vitality and are closely connected both to our times and to our lives.