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"Calling the Soul" - Reflections After Reading
Since 2024, the "Nine Purple Leaving Fire Movement" has been packaged as a harbinger of national technological and cultural prosperity; at the beginning of 2025, DeepSeek was again tied to national fortune, and during the Spring Festival, two films were released—one themed on the unyielding struggle of Chinese laborers in America, titled "Detective Chinatown 1900," and the other, "Nezha 2," promoted with an excessive patriotic fervor. These phenomena collectively showcase a cultural expression filled with splendor, resistance, and a value of "self-awareness."
After reading the book "Calling Souls—The Great Panic of Sorcery in China in 1768," I inexplicably thought of the nationwide movement that took place in the 1960s, as well as the three years that were halted due to the pandemic. These cases seem to reflect a kind of illusion of rights among the grassroots masses: they believe that under the guise of "calling souls," they can maliciously harm others, thereby obtaining a suddenly accessible form of power, which brings them a certain psychological relief.
However, a deeper analysis reveals that the underlying logic is not merely a spontaneous rebellion of the masses, but rather the rulers' use of superstition, faith, and other symbolic values to create panic through supernatural narratives and brainwashing cultural implantation to consolidate their authority. These carefully packaged symbols suggest a kind of inevitability of "heavenly mandate" or "fatalism," and their so-called legitimacy actually obscures the internal entanglements of power and governance flaws, causing the masses to unconsciously fall into a state of obedience in the absence of rational skepticism.