YangCanming
President of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law and Director of IIDPF
This article was published in New Liberal Arts Education Research, No. 3, 2022; due to space limitations, notes are omitted and citations are based on the original publication.
Abstract: Innovation is a fundamental strategy for achieving high-quality development in China as we enter a new stage of development. The cultivation of innovation ability is closely related to three kinds of knowledge. The first is soft knowledge. Soft knowledge plays a fundamental role in all knowledge, and the amount of soft knowledge determines the size of innovation ability. The second is cross-knowledge. Everything in the world is in itself closely connected, and it is only by achieving cross-fertilisation of knowledge that we can get closer and closer to the truth and essence of things. Thirdly, practical knowledge. It can be explained from four aspects: all human knowledge initially comes from practice; all knowledge starts from and belongs to practice; all new situations, new problems and new contradictions are initially revealed in practice; in addition, all theoretical innovations eventually have to go back to guide practice. Soft knowledge, cross knowledge and practical knowledge, these three kinds of knowledge are most conducive to the enhancement of individual innovation consciousness and innovation ability.
Keywords: innovation; soft knowledge; cross knowledge; practical knowledge
The consensus of the whole society is to base on the new development stage, implement the new development concept, build a new development pattern and promote high quality development. Where is the key to high-quality development? The key is innovation. Innovation is our shortcoming and a bottleneck for further development. As a result, China has now proposed an innovation-driven strategy to lead high-quality development with innovation. Similarly in universities, there is a strong emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship education at the moment. It is an important task of university education to enable students to have the awareness of innovation, the ability to innovate and to achieve innovative results. What does innovation have to do with learning? What kind of knowledge is necessary for innovation, or is most conducive to innovation? This is a very important question. For this reason, the discussion in this paper is called Knowledge and Innovation.
I. Overview of Innovation in China since Ancient Times
Our General Secretary Xi Jinping once stated, " China's ancient achievements in astronomy and calendars, mathematics, agronomy, medicine, geography and many other fields of science and technology are world-renowned. These inventions were closely integrated with production and provided strong support for the development of agriculture and handicrafts. The English philosopher Bacon spoke of the printing press, gunpowder and the compass as three inventions that changed the whole face and state of things in the world, so that no empire, sect or person could have had a greater power and influence on human endeavour than these three inventions. Some sources show that of the three hundred most important inventions and discoveries in the world before the sixteenth century, our country accounted for one hundred and seventy-three, far more than its European contemporaries." When it comes to inventions, creations and innovations, there is another version. "Jack Challoner, a scholar at the British Science Museum, had a statistic in 2009: between the Paleolithic (2.5 million years ago) and 2008, all of humanity produced 1,001 major inventions that changed the world, of which China had 30, or three per cent of the total. And all 30 of these inventions appeared before 1500, accounting for 18.4% of the 163 major inventions worldwide before 1500, the last of which was the toothbrush, invented in 1498 and the only major invention of the Ming Dynasty. After 1500, none of the 838 major inventions in the world came from China." In other words, before 1500, China was still good at inventing and innovating. These two versions may be the result of different sampling and different criteria applied to inventions, leading to different statistical results. However, one striking common denominator is that 1500 was a watershed year. It means that after 1500, our country lagged behind in science and technology, in terms of innovation, which is still a shortcoming until now. There are five shortcomings in our economic development now, according to relevant research, and these five shortcomings are all related to innovation.
The first weakness is the high-end engine. Large to aircraft engines, car engines, aircraft carrier engines, small to air engines, as long as the high-end engines are involved in varying degrees of problems, overseas a cut-off supply that China may be constrained. The second gap is materials. China's basic materials 57% by imports, large to aircraft tyres bearing steel, small to the water heater sensor, there are obvious short board. The third short board is CNC machine tools. Many parts, by hand is not produced, to rely on CNC machine tools to complete. But our CNC machine tools in the key nodes still exist "break point" "blocking point", a foreign supply will cause tension at home. The fourth short board is biomedical. There is a serious shortage of biological medicine in China, and many basic drugs are imported, such as antihypertensive drugs. The fifth short board is information hardware. For example, integrated circuits and semiconductor chips are extremely vulnerable to foreign control. An important reason for the decline in Chinese car production is chips. The intelligent and digitalisation process of human society is proceeding rapidly, and China has a shortage of chips, which greatly limits its development.
The innovation-driven strategy is proposed in such an era because innovation has become a very critical constraint, a bottleneck, in the economic and social development of China. Innovation, especially independent innovation, is the key technology in core areas that we need to address. In layman's terms, it is to solve the problem of "limiting technologies". If we do not solve the problem of "limiting technology", the space, strength and sustainability of development will definitely be significantly affected.
It is clear from the material presented earlier that the Chinese are capable of innovation. Some say that the Chinese lack scientific thinking and that their main strength is the humanities. Such an assessment of our culture is fine, but not of our ethnicity. Our culture may be more humanistic in focus, but ethnography preceded culture by many years, many times the time it took for culture to form and develop, and the two must not be confused. There was a school of thought during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States period, but this school of thought has since faded from the stage of history, and it represents the technological DNA of the Chinese people. The Mozi Museum is basically a museum of science and technology. He had many inventions, such as the precision flying machine, which predates the invention of the aeroplane in the West by a long time. The museum also has many military facilities and weaponry inside.
Mozi was a scholar thousands of years ago, and there are Chinese who have now won Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry. Therefore, it is feasible with innovation as long as the conditions are given. It is now up to us to recreate an environment conducive to innovation, to design an institutional arrangement conducive to innovation, to improve a set of laws conducive to innovation, and especially to our education, to inspire students' awareness of innovation and enhance their ability to innovate. The sustainability of innovation must be maintained. As Burton R. Clark states, "As long as higher education remains formally organised, it is the social institution that controls the high level of knowledge and method ...... Knowledge material, especially high-level knowledge material, lies at the heart of the purpose and substance of any higher education system ". The discovery and preservation, transmission and innovation, application and transformation of knowledge is the mission and responsibility of universities, so we who work in higher education have a great responsibility.
The aforementioned innovation mainly concerns the natural sciences and science and technology, but in fact the humanities and social sciences also face the problem of innovation, and the role of innovation in the humanities and social sciences can sometimes be more fundamental and more radical than that of innovation in science and technology. Marx was a researcher in the humanities and social sciences, and it is impossible to overestimate how much of an impact he had on the world. Then, what does innovation have to do with our learning, with our university education, with our students learning knowledge? This paper focuses on three types of knowledge in relation to innovation.
II. Soft Knowledge and Innovation
There is hardware and software for computers, and there is hard and soft knowledge for knowledge. As Hayek made a profound statement about the nature of knowledge. He classified knowledge into two categories: hard knowledge and soft knowledge. Hard knowledge is knowledge that can be expressed and transmitted in words, texts, figures, diagrams, formulas, etc. Such knowledge is available to everyone and can be used centrally, like Newtonian mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity, which are all hard knowledge. Soft knowledge is knowledge that cannot be expressed and transmitted in words, texts, figures, diagrams, formulas, etc. Know-how, for example, can only be communicated. What can be transmitted in words is hard knowledge, and what can only be understood but not transmitted in words is soft knowledge. "The Tao can be very Tao, the name can be very name", meaning that the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao in the true sense of the word. Seems esoteric, but there is just something that you need to comprehend, which is Hayek's point of view. The British philosopher Polanyi divided knowledge into explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge, with the tacit corresponding to the explicit. It is easy to see that the concepts of explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge are roughly the same as Hayek's concepts of hard knowledge and soft knowledge, with hard knowledge corresponding to explicit knowledge and soft knowledge to tacit knowledge. For Polanyi, tacit knowledge is more important than explicit knowledge, it is the governing principle of all knowledge, it is foundational. The most formalised and scientific knowledge, he believed, in fact invariably followed some act of self-consciousness and creativity, and embodied exclusively tacit knowledge. To sum up tacit knowledge or soft knowledge in Chinese terms, only the term 'gnosis', or the ability to comprehend, comes close.
Newton, as we all know, was sitting under an apple tree when an apple fell and hit him on the head. Others, when hit on the head, would have looked up, cursed for a while, thrown the apple away or eaten it, and that would have been the end of it. Newton, however, after being hit, wondered how the apple could have fallen downwards instead of upwards or sideways, and instead of falling downwards on his head. What did he eventually realise? Gravity! Because the earth has gravity, the apple falls to the ground. As the American chemist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and Peace Prize Pauling once remarked, "curiosity and an active imagination are the valuable assets of a scientist". It is precisely soft knowledge that is being referred to here. Some say that when I was at university I learned mathematics, mathematical statistics, calculus and advanced algebra, all of which are hard knowledge. But now, I have forgotten all these course knowledge. However, I have gained the ability to think logically by learning mathematics, which will help me to master other knowledge and adapt to new situations in the future. Albert Einstein said that the value of a university education is not in learning many facts, but in training the brain to think. This ability to think is soft knowledge. Soft knowledge is also the least likely to be forgotten. Siddhartha Gautama was enlightened after meditating under the Bodhi tree for a period of time, and thus founded Buddhism. This is a kind of enlightenment; this is a kind of soft knowledge in action.
Coincidentally, when it comes to innovation in the humanities and social sciences in China, the year 1500 was not only a watershed in our inventions in the natural sciences, but actually a watershed in innovation in the humanities and social sciences as well. What was our last great achievement in the humanities and social sciences? It was Wang Yangming's school of mind. After offending the eunuch Liu Jin at the imperial court, Wang Yangming was sent to Longchang Stage in Guizhou. He also meditated in a cave and eventually worked out the science of the mind. This is the last major achievement of our humanities and social sciences innovation so far. So how is Confucianism ranked? The number one person is Confucius, called the Supreme Sage. The second figure is Mencius, called the sub-sage. The third figure is Zhu Xi. The number four is Wang Yangming. It is a coincidence, but not a coincidence, that the decline in innovation was mainly due to institutional and cultural reasons after the Ming Dynasty.
How is soft knowledge, or enlightenment, developed? How can it be acquired? Talent, which cannot be completely denied, can also be acquired through acquired training. Enlightenment can be trained, and soft knowledge can be acquired through practice. In the words of Dulac, the only way to master this knowledge is to comprehend and practice it. There is talent, but definitely not too much of it. Edison said that success is 1% genius plus 99% perspiration. So now the important point is: without being able to change your talent, how can you improve your ability to comprehend things and enhance your enlightenment by practicing and training later in life. That means to reflect more. The ancients said, "To learn without thinking is to be reckless; to think without learning is to be idle." The process of learning can only be described as the process of collecting and buying raw materials - a bit of steel here, a bit of cement there, a bit of glass there. Including reading a million books and travelling a million miles is the process of collecting raw materials and buying them. Thinking, on the other hand, is the process of processing the raw materials. Thus, learning without thinking is only getting a store of materials, not a new product.
In terms of the knowledge we learn, I also propose a three-dimensional concept. The first is the knowledge of the time dimension. It is the dimension of history, the dimension of time, where we can experience the immense treasure of knowledge. The second is the knowledge of the spatial dimension. Throughout the 80,000 miles, hundreds of countries on earth and perhaps aliens, this is the dimension of space, which will also provide us with a wealth of knowledge. We should not only have knowledge of the time dimension, but also of the space dimension. But if we stop there, we only have the knowledge of these two dimensions, we have only collected the raw materials of the time and space dimensions, and we are still only a warehouse keeper. Thirdly, an additional dimension must be added - thinking. Only when thinking is added can the knowledge of the temporal and spatial dimensions be transformed into new products through the processing of thinking. What about the implementation of this in teaching? We need to guide students to reflect more, so that they can keep thinking about what they have learnt and experience it in their minds, integrating it and making it work. What are the conditions for thinking? Thinking requires silence, an atmosphere and determination.
Thinking and solitude are inseparable. The slogan "Keep students busy" is a valid one. Students cannot stop studying, they cannot sleep all day, they cannot play games all day, they cannot go out shopping all day. But if we simply keep students busy with classes, exams, certificates and dual degrees, what will be the result? What will be the result of such a busy schedule? A lot of hard knowledge, but no soft knowledge. Under the current circumstances, if human beings have more hard knowledge than computers, how can they compete with computers? Can the human brain hold so many things on the Internet? Therefore, even if there is more hard knowledge, it is still limited. In the past, when there were no computers, an old man who had read a book was an encyclopaedia and you could consult him if you didn't understand something. It is different these days. If you want to look up something, you can do a search on the computer and you will find it. The only thing that makes our existence worthwhile is our soft knowledge. A person who has no soft knowledge, only hard knowledge, still lacks value. And to enhance one's self-worth lies in enriching one's soft knowledge, or tacit knowledge.
That is why we need to get students to think more than simply get busy. The entire society needs to do the same, not to be too utilitarian, not to be too impetuous. An innovative society must not be a fickle society, it must not be a society that is desperate for quick success. Everyone who is impatient cannot innovate. Innovation needs an environment, a quiet environment. Classes should not be full of lectures, they should be interactive and heuristic, and students should be allowed to cultivate and train soft knowledge while mastering hard knowledge. Apart from talent, it depends more on acquired effort and on constant thoughtful collisions, including organising discussions among students, such as brainstorming, which are conducive to training soft knowledge.
Entrepreneurship, which we often talk about, is essential for a society. What is true entrepreneurship? The first is alertness to profitable opportunities, the second is simplicity, the third is imagination, the fourth is perseverance and patience, and all of these are not directly related to hard knowledge, they belong to the category of soft knowledge. External causes work through internal causes, we might suggest that hard knowledge works through soft knowledge. Especially in the modern environment of rapid technological development, there is basically no place for more hard knowledge, as it is readily available via the internet. True innovation does not depend primarily on hard knowledge, but is related to soft knowledge. Even if it is related to hard knowledge, it is only after soft knowledge is unified, harnessed and processed that it is effective.
III. Cross Knowledge and Innovation
Most creativity arises from the intersection and integration of disciplines. Many Nobel laureates in economics over the decades have not come from an economics background, but have won the Nobel Prize in economics. Why? Because of the crossover of disciplines. Why does the intersection of knowledge facilitate innovation? The Austrian economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter argued that innovation is the process of introducing knowledge into the economic system, and that such knowledge takes three forms - new knowledge, rediscovered knowledge and reassembled knowledge. Cross-knowledge covers the characteristics and requirements of all three forms of knowledge, and therefore provides a good basis for innovation. While things are closely interconnected, the more we divide and fragment our disciplines, the more we become detached from the essence of things and the more we move away from the truth of things. On the contrary, only through interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinary integration can we get closer and closer to the truth.
The story of the blind man touching the elephant is inspiring because these blind men were generalising the whole picture in parts, knowing only the parts, and so moving away from the truth of the elephant. We are now faced with such a problem, where disciplines and specialisations are becoming more and more subdivided, eventually artificially separating things that were originally interconnected. This is why we are now emphasizing broad-caliber, broad-based, and interdisciplinary approaches. Admissions also advocates a large class enrollment, but our large class enrollment is still a bit out of place, by the third year of college and back again, or to a specific program. Why? The society needs employers, or the traditional inertia is far too large, so the large class enrollment of this broad-caliber training still needs to be promoted substantially.
How many masters have emerged from human society since the Axial Age! Then how many masters have there been since the Industrial Revolution? There are many self-proclaimed masters in society today, but how many of them are really masters? Before the Industrial Revolution, just to name a few, look at these people, what were their professions?
What is the major of Marx? Marxism is not just a matter of specialisation; it contains three components and spans three major disciplines - philosophy, political economy and scientific socialism. And Marx was also said to have written good poetry and had great language skills, not only being a good writer but also multilingual.
Adam Smith, is often referred to as majoring in economics, as the author of the book The Wealth of Nations. In fact he taught four courses at Glasgow University. The first was theology; the second was ethics, specifically The Theory of Moral Sentiments; the third was law; and the fourth was political economy, specifically The Wealth of Nations. It is said that he also studied medicine. Therefore, what would you say was his major?
There was also Aristotle and Confucius. Confucius possessed six art skills - rites, music, archery, imperial, calligraphy and mathematics. Rites were etiquette; music was music; archery was archery; imperial, equivalent to driving skills nowadays, was mainly driving and horse riding; calligraphy was calligraphy; and mathematics was mathematics. Therefore, Confucius was a man who taught six subjects. Confucius later ran a school, but he was actually the headmaster and instructor, all by himself. Aristotle, a contemporary of Confucius, proposed the seven arts, which included grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.
Laozi, a few years older than Confucius, wrote the 5,000-word Tao Te Ching. Some say that the Tao Te Ching is political science, for it is about the principles of governance; some say that it is military science, for it contains many principles of warfare, such as overcoming strength with weakness and overcoming strength with softness, and Sun Tzu's Art of War and Wu Tzu's Art of War both draw their wisdom from him. Others say that he was the founder of chemistry, and that Taoist alchemy came from him. So what is the most convincing thing? He was a philosopher, and we consider Laozi to be the representative of materialistic dialectics and simple materialism, because he especially preached dialectics. For instance, strength and weakness, existence and non-existence, reality and emptiness, the creation of something out of nothing, the creation of nothing out of something, the use of softness to overcome rigidity, the use of weakness to overcome strength, and so on, are all full of dialectics. Therefore Laozi's learning also spans at least a few major disciplines.
What was the specialisation of Mao Zedong? He was born after the industrial revolution, but the reason he was not overly influenced by the division of specialisation is that he was in fact largely self-taught. As for philosophy, he wrote The Theory of Contradiction and The Theory of Practice, and he was very good at it; as for art, he was a good calligrapher; and as for politics, he was certainly a politician, a great one at that. He was also a great politician. Therefore, what is his profession?
When Professor Xu Xianming was the president of China University of Political Science and Law, I attended one of his lectures and I was very impressed by his remark. He said that if you are successful in a tertiary discipline, you can only be considered an academic enthusiast; if you are successful in a secondary discipline (like the finance discipline I work in), you can be considered a researcher; if you are successful in a primary discipline, you can be considered a scholar, such as an economist or a political scientist; only if you are successful across several primary disciplines can you be qualified as a master, so it is not that easy to be a master. The more subdivided the disciplines are, the more they go against the essence of things, which will lead to the result of blind men feeling the elephant.
Adam Smith was the one who emphasised the division of labour, the result of which of course promoted the development of a market economy. As a matter of fact, entrepreneurs did not listen to Adam Smith completely, because according to Adam Smith's logic, the division of labour became more and more detailed and everyone relied more on market exchange, that is, horizontal exchange. But entrepreneurs found in practice that Adam Smith was not entirely right. If everything is not on its own, but on exchange, that exchange is risky. I take my cloth and exchange it for bread, and if something goes wrong one day and the bread cannot be exchanged in time, I will starve to death, which is risky. So what is happening in real life? On the one hand, it is true that there is a growing division of labour; on the other hand, a reverse situation, such as the emergence of large corporations and multinational companies. This runs counter to Adam Smith's logic and is known as the "Smith trap" or "Smith's enigma", which means that this new situation cannot be explained by Adam Smith's principles. While it is good that the division of labour is becoming more and more detailed, some companies are getting bigger and bigger, replacing horizontal specialisation with vertical integration. "Who solved Smith's riddle? It was Coase who solved it. It turns out that we assume that market transaction costs are zero, but they are not circulation costs, they are institutional costs. If transaction costs were zero, then there would be unlimited division of labour, as long as there was horizontal specialisation and horizontal trading. But market transaction costs have since been shown not to be zero, they are positive and risky. There are risks, such as the cost of searching for information, the cost of comparison and contracting, the need to sign contracts for horizontal transactions, the resulting risk of breach of contract, the cost of lawsuits and enforcement of judgments, etc. Slowly, therefore, some trading partners find it too troublesome to merge into a single group. For example, a steel mill merges with an iron ore mine. Originally the mine sold its ore to the steelmaker, but what if one day the mine stopped selling, or met a new buyer and unilaterally broke the contract? Therefore, then the two simply merged to become a joint stock company, and big business, big companies, emerged. Coase's paper The Nature of the Enterprise argues for the boundaries of the enterprise. If a firm is formed, or if a group is formed, it introduces new costs - the costs of vertical management. But what would be the costs of not forming a firm and just going for horizontal transactions? There would be transaction costs, institutional costs. So where are the boundaries of the enterprise? Where the marginal transaction costs and the marginal management costs are equal is the boundary of the enterprise.
Coase won the Nobel Prize for two articles, one on The Nature of the Firm, and one on The Problem of Social Costs, on issues such as trading in pollution rights. What does Coase's theory suggest? It shows that entrepreneurs are not stupid. At first, they advocated an increasingly fine division of labour and specialisation, but entrepreneurs found the situation unfavourable, so in fact they did not follow Smith's theory exactly, but specialised when they should and integrated when they should, as long as they could make more money. But our university specialisations have been getting more and more finely divided. Especially over the years, our majors have been more finely divided than those in the West, and some majors that were once cut have since been restored one after another. My major in finance just doesn't exist in many western countries, it's just the subject of finance. Many of us are still trying to turn tertiary disciplines into secondary disciplines and secondary disciplines into primary disciplines, but this is all because of localism and a lack of awareness of the big picture. What does it mean to advocate a new liberal arts now? It is to re-emphasize interdisciplinarity and interprofessionalism. The rationale lies in the fact that things in the world are originally connected, interrelated, rather than fragmented.
When disciplines become more subdivided, they become more and more fragmented, more and more detached from the truth and less and less able to recognise things as they are. The same applies to a scholar, to a person, specifically. You only focus on your small specialism, but you don't know anything else. What can you do? Of course you will say I can find someone else to work with if I don't know anything. If I only study taxation but not law, I can find a teacher at the law school; if I study taxation but not politics, I can find a teacher at the school of philosophy or the school of government and administration; if I encounter financial problems, I can find a professor at the school of finance to work with me; and so on. This is similar to what Adam Smith said about division of labour and specialisation. Specialisation is possible, but it comes with risks and costs and transaction costs. So isn't there a need for a bit of integration as well, to replace some of the specialisation? We say you can't do everything without asking for it, and you shouldn't ask for everything. It also means that there is also a question of the relationship between specialisation and integration in our learning of knowledge.
The more important thing is that learning knowledge is not yet so simple, it has to do with specialised integration, but it is not quite the same as simply opening a factory and producing a product. If you have a single piece of knowledge in your head, that is, a single material, a single variety, it will not react. If you have a few more specialities in your head, how will it react? It may have a physical reaction, because your head is so big, and you have to fill it with this kind of knowledge and that kind of knowledge, and when you squeeze it in, they will fight and quarrel. Knowledge from different disciplines collide in your head, this is a physical reaction. There is another one called chemical reaction, where knowledge from different majors are in your head, crossing and blending with each other. Whatever the reaction is, it's a good reaction. If you have a variety of professional knowledge colliding in your head, innovation will not be far away. So it's not just a matter of comparing marginal costs, unlike running a company or a factory. Only by mastering multiple knowledge and spanning multiple disciplines can you better find opportunities for innovation, and only then can you constantly spark off new ideas. Therefore, as direct participants and executors of disciplinary cross-fertilisation, teachers should break away from their previous ways of thinking and value orientations formed on the basis of a single disciplinary model, adapt to the development trend of disciplinary cross-fertilisation, broaden their multidisciplinary research horizons, and constantly improve their ability to conduct interdisciplinary research. By the same token, a scholar should not hang on to a single tree. Even if you only study a small issue, which seems to be so small that it belongs to a fourth level discipline, not even a third level discipline, to study the issue well, you must use multiple knowledge across disciplines. For example, if you study personal income tax, which is a small tax, only about 15% of people in China pay personal income tax. But in order to study personal income tax well, you have to understand political science, starting from the origins of the family, private ownership and the state; you have to understand sociology, because personal income tax brings a series of social problems; you also have to understand ethics, studying how to reduce the tax for those who support their parents, how to reduce the tax for those who have many children, and so on; you have to understand economics, but also management, and more importantly, you have to understand the law, because taxation must be paid and levied according to the law. So a small personal income tax, without the knowledge of five or six disciplines, is not well studied. You better have a forest even if you want to study only one tree thoroughly. You can't study a tree unless you know a forest.
IV. Practical Knowledge and Innovation
Practice is the departure point and the destination of theory. Theory is grey, the tree of practice is evergreen. Innovation needs to be grounded, and it is only through in-depth practice that true innovation can be obtained. The theory of practice is the core category of Marxist philosophy. Human beings acquire knowledge and laws for understanding and transforming the objective world through practice, and grasp knowledge and laws for understanding and transforming the subjective world through practice to achieve free and comprehensive human development. The philosopher Locke said that all our knowledge is based on experience. The human mind is like a blank slate without any markings, and it is only after experience has left its mark on it that concepts and knowledge are formed. The Song dynasty philosopher Zhang Zai distinguished between practical knowledge and the knowledge of virtue. The Moists attached more importance to the former and put forward the famous 'three tables': firstly, the 'original' is supported by the historical experience of the ancient sages and kings; secondly, the 'original' is supported by the realistic evaluation of the people's ears and eyes; The third is the evidence of the effect of the "use" of the actual political operation. Confucianism emphasises the latter, i.e. "moral practice". In Confucius' teaching, there are four teachings and four subjects, namely, "literature, conduct, loyalty and faith" (Analects of Confucius), that is to say, literature from the past (literature), social practice (conduct), moral cultivation (loyalty) and code of conduct (faith).
Wang Yangming's doctrine, the School of Mind, has an important idea called the unity of knowledge and action. The unity of knowledge and action is the core concept of Wang Yangming's doctrine, which is the key word of the thesis. Wang Yangming was not a nerd, he led armies and wars and did administration, and did it well, so the unity of knowledge and action was his own experience. There was another person at the back who found that the unity of knowledge and action was also not accurate enough and considered action more important than knowledge. Who was this man? He was Tao Xingzhi, who changed his name and put action before knowledge.
We are aware of Mao Zedong's On Contradiction and On Practicewritten in the kiln in Yan'an. When reform and opening up took place in 1978, it was first of all in terms of public opinion that a great discussion on the question of the standard of truth was initiated. At that time, the Guangming Daily published an important article entitled "Practice is the Only Standard for Testing Truth". This was how the reform and opening up took off, it was public opinion that came first, and this article was an important signal for reform and opening up.
Why is practice so important?
Firstly, all human knowledge originally came from practice. There was no such thing as economics or philosophy in those early days. Human beings began by crawling on the ground on four feet, and only gradually did they walk upright. All human knowledge came from practice, without which there would have been no human beings. That is why we say that labour created man. Why did man stand up? He had to pick fruit with his front two feet, and over time his front two feet became his hands. Labour creates man, and it also develops a sense of teamwork. So this is the first truth, that everything we do comes from practice.
Secondly, all knowledge starts from and is attributed to practice. The usefulness and truth of all knowledge is tested through practice. There is a change in the paradigm of economics research. In the past, it was more about normative research, qualitative research and value judgement, but after the reform and opening up, it slowly started to do quantitative analysis and empirical research, and now, of course, some people say that this model and that model are unintelligible. I don't understand it either, but I don't disagree, why? Many things still need to be proved, falsified or proven. Confucius said, "It is a pleasure to learn and to practice." But he only talked about conclusions and not reasoning, so that people know what is true but do not know why it is true. Even so, Confucius valued practice, and among his four teachings was social practice. In fact, when we talk about empirical analysis, we are also using data from practice to prove whether your view is right or wrong, valid or not, which is in line with the spirit of the article Practice is the only criterion for testing truth.
Thirdly, all new issues and contradictions bubble up in practice first and foremost. New things first come from practice, so if you are closer to practice, the sooner you can see where the bubbles are bubbling up and the sooner you can innovate. If you are further away from practice, and the bubbles are bubbling up, or even spilling out, you may not know it yet, then those who are close to it will be close to the water and get the moon first. When Xiaogang Village in Fengyang County, Anhui Province, started the joint production contract responsibility system, so many people took a big risk by putting their handprints on the agreement. They had no choice, the farmland was in severe drought, the peasants were not motivated to produce, and if they didn't do so, they would have no food to eat. It was only after the central government had gained experience from Xiaogang village that the system of responsibility for joint family production began to spread throughout the country. It was not the Central Government that came up with the idea in the first place, but was inspired and influenced by Xiaogang Village.
Fourthly, all theoretical innovations ultimately have to go back to guide practice before they can be sold, as Marx said, as a "thrilling leap", and their value can be revealed.
When it comes to practice, one has to mention Sima Qian. Why did Sima Qian write The Records of the Grand Historian? It was a great humiliation for him to be tortured by Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, but he survived because he had a mission to accomplish, and he wanted to write The Records of the Grand Historian. One might say that since Sima Qian was in such a state, it was impossible for him to go out for research and practice, so he had to write his book behind closed doors, right? If you understand it this way, you are wrong. What was the actual situation? He made three major trips during his life and visited many places. The first trip was in 126 BC, when he was still very young, and he travelled from the capital, Chang'an, through Nanyang in Henan and Jiangling in Hubei, to the Miluo River, where he visited the sunken abyss of Qu Yuan; then he travelled east along the Yangtze River to Jiujiang in Jiangxi, where he climbed Mount Lu and examined the site of the 'Yu Shu Jiujiang'; then he travelled along the Yangtze River to Then along the Yangtze River to Shaoxing, where he learnt about the process of the Great Yu's water healing, and then to Mount Huijie in Zhejiang, where he visited the famous 'Yu Cave'. The city was also the capital of King Goujian of Yue in the Spring and Autumn period, and Sima Qian visited the site to see the remains of the city and learn more about it. From Shaoxing in Zhejiang province, he went to Suzhou in Jiangsu province, then crossed the river to Huaiyin, where he visited the hometown of Han Xin, the famous general of the early Han Dynasty; then he went north to Shandong province, to Qufu to see the legacy of Confucius; later he went to Linzi (now Zibo in Shandong province), the capital of seven northern states, then to Pei County in Xuzhou, the home of Liu Bang; then he went to Suizhou to visit the battlefield of the uprising of Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, as well as the battle between Chu and Han; he went to Daliang (now Kaifeng in Henan province), the capital of the Wei Dynasty, to collect stories about the Duke of Wei, Lord Xinling. He then returned to Chang'an, completing his first journey of several thousand miles. He was only 20 years old at the time, and it was not easy for him to have travelled so many places. Soon after his return to Chang'an, Sima Qian began his political career. Shortly afterwards, he travelled with Emperor Wu on a tour of southern Sichuan and the border with Yunnan, recording the landscape, products and transport of Ba, Shu, Qiong and Tile. This was the second trip. Sima Qian's third trip was in 110 BC. He travelled east with Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty to Mount Tai to participate in the enthronement ceremony. After the enthronement ceremony, he toured Changli and Wulong in Hebei and Wu Yuan in Inner Mongolia. In less than 20 years, Sima Qian travelled almost all over the country at that time. So Sima Qian's The Records of the Grand Historian was never written in his room. The experience of his travels accumulated a great deal of material for him, which he also included in his diary. In such a humiliating situation, he did not die. It was precisely because of this state of mind and the abundance of first-hand material that he wrote his masterpiece, The Records of the Grand Historian, which will remain immortal throughout the ages.
It is thus clear that practice is important, and that one must read a thousand books and travel a thousand miles. There is a Chinese idiom that says, "A single stroke of brilliance". When Zhuang became the king of Chu Kingdom, he ignored the government for three years. A minister called Ren Ju met with King Zhuang and said, "There is a bird standing there, but it does not fly and does not chirp. What kind of bird was it? He said that the bird did not fly, but flew to the sky; it did not chirp, but chirped. Later, after three years of extensive research and study, he began to promulgate his own policy agenda, and the state of Chu soon became powerful. King Chu Zhuang first researched and planned, which is called sharpening the knife and chopping wood.
When Shang Yang arrived in Qin, he was not to be seen at first. The Duke of Qin said, "This guy used to be a great speaker when he was trying to recruit talents, but now he is no longer a great speaker. One time when he was on a business trip, Shang Yang suddenly came up to him and said, "Wait a minute, I have something to tell you. The Duke said, "Wait until I return. After Shang Yang whispered a few words in his ear, the Duke decided not to go on the trip and talked to him for three days and nights, which led to Shang Yang's Change of Law. It turned out that Shang Yang was doing research right from the beginning.
Mao Zedong had a famous saying, "Without investigation you have no right to speak". It was no accident that Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist Party to defeat the Kuomintang. If we look at these investigation reports he wrote - "Report on the investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan", "Analysis of the various classes in Chinese society", "The struggle in Jinggang Mountain", "The fire of a star can start a prairie", etc., these largely laid the ideological Theoretical and road foundations, so practical knowledge is the source of innovation. Comrade Deng Xiaoping adhered to the Party's ideological line and insisted that everything should be done from the practical point of view. The success of reform and opening up did not depend on books, but on practice, on seeking truth from facts, "Pioneering and innovation is the most distinctive leadership style in the life of Comrade Deng Xiaoping, and it is also always the historical role that Chinese Communists should have".
Conclusion
Universities are institutions that "transmit profound knowledge, analyse and critique existing knowledge and explore new areas of learning". This responsibility requires a critical spirit, an active mind, a broad perspective and practical experience. If we are able to impart these three types of knowledge to our students in our regular teaching, I believe that their creative awareness and ability to innovate will be greatly enhanced. These three types of knowledge are soft knowledge, cross knowledge and practical knowledge.
[Citation format] Yang Canming, 'Knowledge and Innovation', New Liberal Arts Education Research, Vol. 3, No. 2022, pp. 5-15.