Public domainThe LIBERATION of a CIVILIZATION
文明的解放Speech on Mount Tai at the Dai Miao
While Li himself spoke to a small crowd at the summit of the recently-liberated holy Mount Tai, couriers rushed throughout the country and recited the speech in every village and town. Copies of the speech were published in newspapers in large cities, and translated copies were sent to foreign newspapers in cities in Europe and the Americas.
We had long been held captive by the cycles of history - of war, pestilence, poverty, and oppression. At the heart of it all has been the degradation of the common man to a mere tool for emperors and warlords to use at their disposal. It was Sima Qian, two thousand years ago, who had written of the excesses and drama of the great Emperors, whose own ambition wrought havoc on the lands of China. These same cruel intentions and actions repeated themselves through the generations, the dynasties, the empires and kingdoms, long after his death and to today.
Whether it had been foreign occupiers - the Mongol Horde, the Manchu Qing, the Korean slaver empire - or own countrymen, it was the empire that strangled our civilization. Rather than letting it flourish in full, the Emperor locked our national spirit into chains and stirrups, directed the collective genius, hope, and industry toward his own agenda, one that rarely aligned with the needs and dreams of a nation. You may say, “But some Emperors were good, were kind, were revered”, and yes, some were, but their goodness was merely a reflection of the goodness inherent in the population. An average man of his time would care far more intimately for his own village and neighbor than any Emperor had ever cared personally for the whole of China.
Today, we no longer stand in splendor to the rest of the world. Our divine isolation is broken, shattered by the successive failures of generations of empire. We now know the savagery of the imperial domains - the unspeakable evils wrought by the Korean slavers upon our cities and countryside, the Western empires that stretch across oceans, breaking the spirits of nations yearning to be free. Thousands upon thousands of young men die in vain for the greed of glory upon their masters and emperors. Their blood stains the soil red. And the savagery of empire ends not there, but with the horrors of new weapons, weapons that distinguish not between soldier and civilian, between child and parent, between man and woman, between elder and warrior. This suffocation, a most unholy and inhuman weapon devised only by the most depraved of minds and employed by the most depraved of generals, slaughter thousands and erase cities. The future of empire is staring us, square in the face, its barbarism ennobled by crowns, jewels, and robes. This is a grim fate.
It is a fate we may escape, however, with splendid optimism. When we slay the beast of empire, we liberate civilization. Our freedom to escape the cycle that we have been bound to depends on our - all of ours - from the bureaucrat to the farmer, the elder, the merchant, the wife, the child - decisive action. I stand here on Mount Tai to ask for the blessing of the ancestors in our national quest for liberation, but more importantly I ask the whole of our nation, of every soul within our border, to push once more against the prison walls of empire. We have fought, side by side, nearly a decade, but at this point, the light of a new world breaks through. With one more push together, the Great Republic (Dà Mínguó 大民國) is birthed. A civilization is liberated as a flower blooms. With our constitution, we carve our liberty in jade, preserved, proud, and free. Our ancestors’ dream of bringing heaven to earth is realized. They had long known of our special civilization - the Huáxià, distinct from any crown or banner - and how we had evolved beyond the barbarism that plagues our world. We shall carry their mandate in our hearts, and with it, the spirit of the greatest nation sings.
It must be said that we cannot trade one master for another. This war of liberation was not the battle of one man, or one house, or one tribe, or one sex. It was the battle of us all. That the spirit of liberty shall live, it must be live wholly, unfettered, unencumbered. It cannot be held by one group alone. It must be in balance, held by everyone. The women of our nation raised those who had fought. The women have kept our communities and villages whole even when its young men were sent to defeat the Korean slavers. They have commanded their own brigades; they have gathered intelligence; they have saved thousands through ingenuity and discreetness. And one cannot expect their service to be repaid in demands of their servility. Their liberation mirrors that of the civilization as whole; indeed, our civilization can only survive when we put it all into balance - lifting the whole, not a shattered fragment.
One day, our generation will be remembered as a nation of heroes - a generation that threw off the shackles of empire. A generation that restored a civilization to the potential it has been forced to repress. A generation that created a nation worth fighting, and dying for. When we devote ourselves to our cause - to each other - we shall be as unstoppable, and we shall become a great force of the universe, the Heavens, and the Earth.
