Another Year, Half Real, Half Dream

Last night, while watching a movie on the movie channel with my wife, she suddenly asked me when we could live like people do in the movies—everyone no longer wearing masks, life back to normal. I told her that, thanks to modern science, it might take 5-10 years. If science were not as advanced as it is today, the process would take about 150 years—that is how long it takes, under purely natural conditions, for humans to develop herd immunity and adapt to a new virus.

This morning it snowed in Beijing. At about 6:30 I rode my electric scooter, carrying my wife, to the shuttle bus stop. Only in a year like this did we realize how inconvenient it is not to have a car; if we had one, she could now drive to and from work. Unfortunately, we have entered the license-plate lottery for years and never won a number.

Starting on January 19 of last year, I began to voice my own opinions publicly. Afterward I wrote roughly a hundred articles, totaling 200,000-300,000 words, about COVID-19, which were read on the internet on the order of tens of millions of times. Beginning in May 2020, I gradually hid these articles, because by then it was no longer possible to stop the pandemic, and my feelings could only be described as what more is there to say. To an established reality, I can only accept it.

Moreover, as the pandemic developed, populism rose around the globe, and many anti-intellectual voices muddied the waters and incited hatred—and this remains the case today. Getting caught up in such a wave neither solves problems nor is rational. So after that I stopped writing articles on this subject and instead quietly, on my own, recorded an apolitical history of these times, intending to publish it when the opportunity arises.

In June of last year I found a plot of land to grow vegetables. At the end of December the lessor told me that, because of the national policy of returning farmland to forest, this plot could no longer be rented to us for growing vegetables in 2021. After the New Year, if I still wanted a pastoral life, I would have to find another plot. But finding vegetable plots within an hour's bike ride is already difficult, and places too far from home are unrealistic for me, so I am not sure whether I can still enjoy such a pleasant pastoral life in 2021.

This year was both real and dreamlike; many people still cannot accept this sudden change. It has become very inconvenient for patients to seek care; getting an appointment at a Beijing top-tier tertiary hospital is harder than before. Some critically ill patients are helpless, and some have given up treatment for financial reasons.

Life after 2020 has been cruel for many people. When the population density on Earth reaches its present level, a pandemic of this scale is inevitable. So whether we like it or not, we must accept such disasters as unavoidable in our natural existence.

Everything that happened this year sounded an alarm for everyone—though some people stubbornly refuse to accept the warning, there is no doubt they have been affected too. For me and my family, the most significant effect has been to raise our vigilance. From now on we may always wear masks when leaving home; masks will become standard whenever we contact outsiders, and disinfection will become a habit—not only to guard against COVID-19, but also against other pathogenic microorganisms.

At first I too thought we should be able to avoid this pandemic through more reasonable institutional design. But later I felt that even if we avoided this pandemic, we could not avoid others. A world-class plague was bound to come sooner or later, and it is only a matter of these few years. The reason is simple: there are too many people in the world, living too densely. When population density is high, plagues cannot be avoided. Add to that severe polarization between rich and poor, and uneven levels of civility among people; among 7.8 billion people, there will always be someone who brings a virus or bacterium capable of causing such a pandemic into the population and spreads it rapidly, beyond human power to stop.

So I let go of everything and accepted reality. Life before 2020 was real, and life after 2020 is another kind of reality. Ultimately we must look beyond nationalism and political stances to understand everything that happens in nature; reason will help us calm our emotions.

This pandemic has not been entirely without merit. It is tantamount to dropping a nuclear bomb of awesome power on humanity. I believe it can shatter the old equilibrium previously controlled by various interest groups and establish a new, more reasonable set of balancing rules in the human world.

It will just take some time—perhaps ten years, perhaps even ten years is not enough. In any case, being able to stir up a wave of change in this dreary world is itself a rare gain. As for problems that wishes cannot change, leave them to time to resolve.