After Surviving All the Storms, the Original Heart Remains — Written on My 45th Birthday

Today is my 45th birthday; after this day I enter my 46th year (47 by nominal Chinese age). Yesterday, a judge from the Beijing Financial Court sent me the final-instance judgment in the subrogation-recovery dispute between me and an insurance company. The final instance upheld the first-instance judgment and rejected the insurance company's appeal. This means that in the final instance of the subrogation-recovery dispute arising from the traffic accident I had on November 19, 2023, I won again. This was the first lawsuit of my life; despite being regarded as unlikely to win by Beijing legal professionals, I prevailed through rigorous, tightly argued defense in both the first and second instances. First I thank the friends who have advised me throughout this period, and also those who frankly told me I most likely could not win. They enlightened my thinking from both positive and negative sides, helping me form an even more rigorous defense, so that the opposing side's legal staff were unable to mount a response in either the first or second instance. This is the first case in Beijing decided in this manner; my case has rewritten Beijing's prior judicial practice. I do not know whether similar disputes in Beijing will henceforth be decided by reference to my case, but I have at least achieved a breakthrough from zero in Beijing. Personally I have won a clean victory, and perhaps this victory has made a small contribution to advancing the rule of law. Courts in different Chinese provinces take different approaches to the question of whether, in traffic accidents, non-motor vehicles and pedestrians who are assigned responsibility by the traffic authorities should compensate motor vehicles for vehicle damage. Two diametrically opposed lines of reasoning exist: one holds that non-motor vehicles and pedestrians should bear the cost of motor-vehicle damage, while the other holds that they should not, and that their fault should instead be reflected only by reducing the proportion of compensation that motor vehicles owe to them. On China Judgements Online, both approaches are supported by a large number of cases; the phenomenon of like cases being decided differently is widespread. Beijing has historically supported the view that non-motor vehicles and pedestrians should compensate motor vehicles for vehicle damage; Chongqing, Liaoning, and Inner Mongolia also support this. Thus in those regions, once a non-motor vehicle or pedestrian is in a traffic accident with a motor vehicle, the person may not only be injured or even killed, but may also have to pay for the motor vehicle's repairs. But courts in Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangdong, Hebei, Henan, and elsewhere do not support requiring non-motor vehicles and pedestrians to pay for motor-vehicle repairs. I consulted Beijing judges, lawyers, and traffic police, and every one of them told me my case was a certain loss; therefore they were all quite surprised when I won both the first and final instances. In fact, in the second instance, the opposing lawyer cited a similar case he had litigated in 2023 as evidence, hoping the second-instance judge would overturn the first-instance judgment. In that case the non-motor-vehicle party had been killed, yet the insurance company's legal counsel still won, successfully recovering the car repair costs from the deceased's estate; his opponents had been three professional lawyers from a Beijing law firm. So the Beijing lawyers, judges, and traffic police I consulted were not without reason in being so certain I would lose. The judgment I won is, in nationwide terms, also the first in insurer subrogation-recovery disputes arising from non-motor-vehicle versus motor-vehicle traffic accidents to rewrite prior judicial practice. My case may become one of the landmark reference cases cited by other legal professionals; as such, it has a certain positive significance for advancing the rule of law in China. I had thought I might have a slim chance of winning, but I never expected to win so easily. After reading the defense briefs I wrote for the first and second instances, a judge friend asked me in return: "With a defense brief this rigorous, if you yourself were the judge, could you refute it?" He added that if I switched careers to become a lawyer, I could become one of China's top attorneys—such is my rigorous capacity for reasoning. After the first instance, I wrote an article explaining how I won this lawsuit (see my essay "How I Won a Traffic-Accident Claim That Legal Professionals Thought I Could Not Win"). As it happened, that article was seen by the family of another person in Beijing involved in a similar accident; they contacted me to say they are currently facing the same lawsuit. My victory encouraged them, and they were inspired by the defense reasoning I published; they plan to draw on my defense approach in responding to their case. I hope they also succeed. Once a few such cases succeed, the adjudication rules for similar cases in Beijing will be thoroughly changed. I also hope more people can benefit from my defense reasoning and prevail in similar lawsuits. Perhaps in the near future the insurance companies will realize the difficulty and back off, no longer wasting effort on suing non-motor vehicles and pedestrians; then the legislative spirit of traffic law in protecting the vulnerable, and the spirit of the government's fifth judicial reform—centered on the principle of uniform adjudication of like cases to promote judicial fairness—will also be manifested. In my twenties, a young man named Sun Zhigang from my home province of Hubei was beaten to death by patrol officers during a residency-permit check while working away from home. Willing to risk retaliation, I joined the campaign calling for the abolition of China's urban detention and repatriation regulations, writing several influential articles online and becoming one of the main opinion leaders of the time. In the end the incident ignited public outrage, and the appeals of the concerned people who joined the campaign received a response from our government. Then-Premier Wen Jiabao signed the legal document abolishing the urban detention and repatriation regulations; from then on, migrant workers in China no longer had to live in anxiety about not carrying their temporary residence permits. At 45, I have, through involvement in just such a lawsuit, successfully broken the long-standing judicial practice of Beijing, this crucial municipality, and rewritten the established rules. I believe both of these things have positive significance for social progress; that I have been able to take part in two such endeavors in my lifetime means my life has not been wasted. When I was fighting this lawsuit, I told my wife that whether we won or lost, we must keep a peaceful mind. My effort to respond was aimed at changing the status quo; success would certainly be gratifying, but failure should also be met calmly, without harboring resentment toward anyone. If we lost, we would simply treat the money as support for the families of insurance-company employees; by providing jobs, the insurance companies also contribute to society. If a judge ruled against us, that would have its own logic—after all, viewed from different standpoints, the conclusion differs. I also comforted her not to be too anxious over any misfortune that befell us; we should regard everything that happens to us as trials ordained by heaven to temper us. Only by going through these trials can our minds grow. At the same time, we should also regard them as social responsibilities we must bear. Born human, living in this society and having raised offspring, we have an obligation to improve society, to make it more habitable for everyone together. This is being responsible to ourselves, to our descendants, and to society. My wife said she was a small woman who could not elevate her mindset to such a level; she only wanted her husband to be safe. If losing meant paying compensation, she would use her own salary to help me pay; she wanted my peace of mind undisturbed. For her, my surviving the car crash was already heaven's favor toward her; she was content. She could accept a bad outcome—paying compensation as a way to ward off misfortune. I have lived half my life in this world and weathered many storms and setbacks, yet I have not been remade into a realist. My original heart remains; I am still an idealist, and I have long held a personal conviction about promoting social progress. Although I am no paragon myself, with many bad habits and emotional debts owed to many people, I still believe that a good social system benefits everyone, and that I should take part in the work of transforming society. The reason I have kept writing all these years is, in a sense, also a hope of advancing social progress. The power of a single individual is small, but by persistent effort it counts for something, more or less. Compared with the impatient urgency of youth, middle age brings a certain composure; when we want to accomplish something, we do it without haste or anxiety. At the same time, we have come to understand the complexity of society—that changing the world must begin with small things, rather than relying on impractical grand narratives to realize our ideals. Rigorous thinking and a firm will can indeed help us accomplish in life many things that others cannot. When my confidence wavered and I wanted to give up, several relatives and friends who are equally passionate about advancing social progress encouraged me to keep going. They persuaded me to respond to the case with the mindset of "the predecessors plant trees, the descendants enjoy the shade." One friend said conventions are made to be broken; someone must do it before a convention can be broken. If capable people also refuse to strive, then ordinary people have even less hope. Their words once again firmed my conviction: I studied the relevant law carefully, wrote my defense brief, and actively responded to the suit. Bringing this matter to a close in such a short time has lightened my heart greatly. I had expected it to drag on, requiring about two years to handle; I never imagined it would end in little more than two months. Having laid down this burden, I am ready to devote myself fully to my studies and to medicine—that is what I value most. Compared with life, everything else is secondary. Over the next five to seven years I hope to study the new foundational knowledge across the various fields of the life sciences, systematically and thoroughly, to improve myself in an all-round way. Twelve years have passed since I formally took a master and signed an apprenticeship agreement to become a student of Chinese medicine, studying clinical medicine under him. These twelve years—and the many years before them—I have borne witness to the parting and death, the joys and sorrows, of the human world. Each time I deeply study a new disease, I open a new, painful door to hell. Statistics are cold. In textbooks, the prevalence of diseases that make people wish they could die—or wish they could not—is only a tiny-looking percentage. Multiply those percentages by the total population, then encounter some typical patients and listen to their inner voices, and what we see is a vast multitude of people in terrible suffering. Cancer, stroke, post-stroke sequelae, COPD, ALS, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, anxiety, Alzheimer's disease... Behind each of these disease names lie countless tears and the sorrow of countless families. Many people, unable to bear the torment of illness, have taken their own lives, ending the pain of living with death. Human beings, and indeed the entire animal kingdom, have feelings; when disease torments ourselves or our loved ones and causes enormous suffering, who can remain unmoved? The longer I practice clinically, the more I feel my own shallowness and inadequacy, and the more I appreciate how tiny humanity is before nature and disease. We so desperately long to save the lives of those closest to us and relieve their suffering, yet often things go against our wishes; we must watch them endure torment and finally leave this world in pain. From the moment cells first appeared on this planet, they were programmed for automatic apoptosis; life is a time-limited process, and birth, death, and disease are the fate from which none of us can escape. Our evolutionary history on this planet is a long journey of struggling against and mutually adapting to environment, disease, and disaster. As we adapt to the environment, we also transform it, all so that we may live more healthily and comfortably during our years. At the same time, we protect those we love and those who love us, sparing them some of the torment. Out of this love, altruism and universal benevolence develop; it is precisely this spirit that keeps our species from going extinct too easily. Evolution is a group phenomenon; the particular advantages that any individual develops over the course of evolution may eventually be written into our gene pool in the form of genes and inherited by our descendants. Likewise, all the civilizational achievements we develop—including medical knowledge—converge into a vast treasury of knowledge that benefits everyone and is inherited by those who come after. I am a person with a sense of mission. A single individual may think he need have no mission, but mission objectively exists within a species. In any group, some individuals will shoulder various missions, because if a species is to continue to reproduce, it must have the awareness and ability to meet challenges. People in middle age may come to see this clearly. In meeting the various challenges of life, we naturally realize that we bear responsibilities both to our families and to society. We have a responsibility to overcome all kinds of difficulties for our families, and a responsibility to create a better living environment for everyone, and indeed for all living things. If everyone shirked these responsibilities, the world would be a dim place, and life would not reproduce for long. A physician has two missions: first, to inherit the experience of predecessors and do his utmost to relieve people of pain; second, to develop his own experience, doing his utmost to create new methods and techniques for relieving pain, and to pass them on to those who come after. For this reason, a physician's life is destined to be a life of continuous learning and exploration. For me, learning is not merely a temporary task but a lifelong one. But over the next five years, more than 80% of my time will be devoted to dedicated study; I need such a period to improve myself systematically. So in these days I have declined many people; I hope you will understand my unavoidable constraints. My father took my given name "Zhiyuan" (lofty ambition) from the ancient maxim "one's will should aim high." From the moment I was conceived in my mother's womb, I was expected to have great aspirations. As I grew, people again and again—because of my name, and because of my talents and performance—urged me to aim high and spurred me onward along the road of idealism. What, then, is a lofty ambition? Is it pursuing fame and success? To some people, yes. But in my understanding, a lofty ambition means transcending the small self, merging oneself into a vast collective, and seeking solutions to problems for all beings; it means fulfilling the responsibility of carrying forward the past and opening up the future as we live and reproduce on this planet; it means that whether or not one personally achieves fame and success, as long as there is breath, one struggles on, exploring new survival skills and striving to improve the quality of everyone's life. One day, most people, in encountering the sufferings of birth, old age, sickness, death, unfulfilled desire, and parting from loved ones, will grasp the deep meaning of life—many of the things once valued in our lives are in fact light as a feather and insignificant. The challenges and pains we meet in living, the tears we have shed, will tell us what we truly ought to cherish. I do not know how long the rest of my life will be, but however long it is, I will devote it to medical exploration—a kind of exploration that fuses spirit and body and penetrates into the very core of life, an endless pursuit of the life sciences in the broad sense. The road of idealism is long, but I will walk it firmly to the end of my life, regardless of whether the way is filled with hardship. No pains, no gains; I believe that hardship will surely be accompanied by joy.