AI 微博翻译：**On the Plain Truth Spoken by Weijia Jiang**
When Weijia Jiang, a Chinese-born correspondent, recalled before the assembled dignitaries of the White House press dinner the poverty from which her family had emerged, the contrast between her origin and her present station required neither ornament nor exaggeration. She stood among ministers, courtiers, journalists, and the President himself; she questioned the chief magistrate without servility, reproved him without fear, and exercised, in the presence of power, those liberties which power is commonly most reluctant to endure. Such a spectacle could scarcely have been produced except in that republic which the Chinese language, with an accidental felicity, has styled the “Beautiful Country.” The freedom of speech and of the press may sometimes offend the vanity of rulers and the patience of the public; yet they remain among the surest foundations of republican government.
The ceremony was enlivened by an incident whose irony might have pleased a more philosophical observer. An award was conferred upon two journalists whose investigations had exposed the connection between President Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, and had contributed to the demand for greater disclosure of the Epstein records. The President, compelled by the usages of the occasion to honor those whose work had caused him no small embarrassment, bestowed the distinction with a smile in which courtesy struggled visibly against resentment. The triumph of liberty is seldom more complete than when authority is obliged to applaud its accusers.
Very different is the condition of those societies in which the habits of feudal obedience have survived the institutions that first produced them. There the distance between the ruler and the ruled is not merely political but almost metaphysical. The official is elevated above the citizen; the magistrate above the villager; and the humblest possessor of authority assumes the manners of a petty sovereign. An ordinary man may not presume to sit beside the president, nor perhaps even to share a platform with the head of his village. A complaint which, in a free state, would be dismissed or debated may, under a jealous despotism, be punished as insolence.
The durability of such systems cannot be explained by force alone. The oppressed too often become the guardians of their own subordination. Like the lower orders in a caste society, they accept inequality as part of the natural arrangement of the universe; they observe its ceremonies, defend its prohibitions, and fear that the smallest breach of rank will dissolve society into confusion. Thus custom completes what coercion began, and servitude, once established by the sword, is perpetuated by the imagination.
The armies of Hunan displayed courage, discipline, and a formidable constancy in battle; but their political understanding remained confined within the decaying structure they had been summoned to defend. They preserved the Manchu dynasty with the same energy that, under happier instruction, might have founded a freer commonwealth. When Sun Yat-sen, already acquainted with the constitutional principles of the United States, presented to Li Hongzhang the outline of a republican future, the veteran statesman could admire neither the necessity nor the grandeur of the design. Minds formed in the service of an ancient order rarely comprehend that its ruin has become inevitable.
The work was therefore reserved for a younger generation, whose imagination had been enlarged by the constitutional and republican doctrines of America. These youths helped to complete the passage from empire to republic and, through later struggles, to secure the victory of the New Democratic Revolution. Yet political forms may be altered more rapidly than political habits. The throne may fall while the instinct of submission survives; titles may disappear while servility remains; and a nation may proclaim the sovereignty of the people before the people have learned to regard themselves as sovereign.
To extinguish the lingering poison of feudalism, to awaken in ordinary men and women the consciousness that the state is theirs, and to release the powers of invention, judgment, and courage which hierarchy has so long suppressed—this is a labor not of a single revolution, but of many generations.