Miss Dong from Gree has once again made headlines with her remarks. Recently, at a public meeting, she stated that Gree does not need overseas talent because there are spies among returnees. I don't quite understand what spies would steal from an air conditioning company. Are they going to steal the mysteriously superior color schemes? So, I looked it up, and it turns out that Wang Ziru, who had previously been rumored to be involved with Miss Dong, was a recipient of the 2016 "Peacock Plan" for high-level overseas talent. Does this mean that companies cannot hire returnees, but households can?
In this world, there are no perpetual motion machines or magic doors. If one must say there is, it would be Gree as described by Miss Dong. Her mouth is like a super magic wand that summons 72 transformations. It not only turns air conditioners into power stations but also transforms refrigerators into time machines that keep vegetables fresher for longer.
I have an observational conclusion: a major indicator of the prosperity of an industry is the density of verbal output. Once upon a time, to promote Gree's mobile phones, Miss Dong personally appeared on the phone's startup screen, which made those who bought the phones feel quite uncomfortable, leading to a wave of returns, and thus the market plummeted. Upon hearing the news, those who purchased the mysteriously colored Gree air conditioners felt somewhat reassured: thankfully, the air conditioning doesn't blow out Miss Dong.
Is it now that air conditioners are also hard to sell? The outbursts from Dong Mingzhu are certainly a reflection of her personality. She is who she is, a unique firework among the crowd. In a normal society, as long as a company does not break the law or act immorally, the evaluation axis from society should align with the saying—making money is not shameful.
However, such anti-intellectual remarks have already touched upon public interest and even carry the suspicion of being illegal, attracting deserved ridicule. As for the audience of these anti-intellectual statements, they are what we should be most wary of. Miss Dong's words, at best, are arrogant and outdated, but those who defend her statements are almost extreme in their output.
The notion that all overseas students are colonizers, foreign trash, or spies, and that they should all be kept out of the country, should never be underestimated. The extremism underlying these people's rhetoric and cognition is completely unbounded. This group, nurtured by anti-intellectualism, has lost all sense of self and humanity; when someone merely draws a knife, they are eager to stab.
The soil in which this populism grows is precisely what we must be seriously vigilant about. If we do not stand up to stop it today, it will develop into a more terrifying disaster that will descend upon each of us. The parts of history that are most likely to repeat are indeed its ugliest aspects.