Respected faculty, dear students, ladies and gentlemen,

It is my great pleasure to extend my warmest congratulations to the opening of 2010 academic year. I also warmly welcome all of you coming from almost all of the world to study at Tsinghua University.

Confucius told his students 2,000 years ago,“It is a great pleasure to have friends coming to visit you from far away.”

It is really a big moment in your life since tomorrow you will start your academic study at a university which you feel proud of. But your future success is not defined by your success in the entrance examinations to Tsinghua.

What should be the defining moments of your life? What events will shape you in extraordinary ways, which will eventually make Tsinghua feel proud of you, instead of you feel proud of Tsinghua?

Looking at the youthful faces sitting in front of me, my mind goes back to my own youth day. In the summer of 1982, I was among the first group of college graduates. I felt so proud of myself when most of the young people were still laboring in villages, coal mines and factories.

After I graduated from university, I was assigned a job with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with theoretical physicists most of my time.

One day, Prof. Qian Sanqiang, father of Chinese atomic bomb, asked me to go to the India embassy, acting as an interpreter at the dinner. During the dinner, the Indian Ambassador stood up and gave a speech. He said,” standing in front of Prof. Qian Sanqiang, I feel so humble. Mr. Qian knows everything about nothing but I know nothing about everything.”

I was totally confused and did not know how to translate the sentences into Chinese.

Later, a particle physicist explained to me that nothing is dark matter. Dark matter is inferred to exist from gravitational effects on background radiation. Dark matter constitutes 80% of the matter in the universe, while ordinary matter makes up only 20%.

At that moment, it is not the Indian ambassador who felt so humble in front of science. It is me, a self-conceited young man felt so humble in front of science.

Three years later, when I was admitted to the graduate school of journalism, I decided to become a science writer. I spent the next 15 years writing science stories for China Daily, Xinhua News Agency, Washington Post, Archaeology magazing and Science magazine.

To this day, my disaster in failing to translate the word “nothing” is poignantly among the defining moments of my journalism life. To me, journalism is all about science, curiosity, learning and most important about your attitude towards life.

Next year will mark the 100thh anniversary of our university. Ninety-nine years ago, one of the four Chinese professors who taught at Tsinghua was professor Liang Qichao who founded one of the earliest newspapers in China. Professor Liang put forward four cardinal principles of journalism: serving the interests of the vast majority of the Chinese people, producing new but correct ideas, providing rich but well-selected knowledge and reporting accurately and fast.

Professor Liang’s principles of journalism is particularly relevant to today media landscape of digitalization and commercialization.

The digitalization and the high commercialization of media in China have cultivated a digital journalism which can be described as a culture between commercials. With the culture, media is anything that carry commercials. News is anything attractive between commercials.

The digital journalism is characterized by scandelization, sensationalization, exaggeration, oversimplification, highly opinionated news stories, extremely one-sidedly reporting and even fabrication, which have done more harm than good to the public affairs. Today the Chinese journalists are more prey to the manipulation of commercials and the emotions of the internet audiences rather than being a faithful messenger for the public.

How could this happen? Here are some figures to answer this question: over 90% of Chinese journalists are working without a salary. They simply make a living with a press card or with a business card. In daily life, people do not know who the journalist is. When a coal mine accident happens in Shangxi, everyone becomes the journalist instantly. Hundreds of taxi drivers, cooks, barbers, farmers and jobless people would stand in a long line in front of the office of the coal mine owner collecting money with their press cards.

Being digital, China is entering a society with little social trust and rare social cohesion, particularly in time of crisis. The government, the public and the media do not trust each other. Nowadays, when people really want to speak out or giving a candid talk, the speakers would ask no recording, no camera and no journalists before he starts talking. But being digital, all recorder, cameras and journalists are hidden digitally. Today in China, the journalist could be your friend, your enemy, your student or your colleague. Sometime, when you agree to accept an interview with a media, you do not dare to read the newspapers or look at the website the next day. For fear you are being scandalized by being quoted totally out of context.

With interns and unpaid migrant journalistic laborers working for 2000 TV channels, 1000 radio stations, 2,000 newspapers, 9,500 magazines, the Chinese journalists have no choice but sensationization, exaggeration and sometimes fictionization under the pressure of seeking high rating and circulation.

Statistics show that the Chinese are 15 times online more than Americans. The problem is that of the 400 million internet users in China. 80 percent of the adult users never go to college, 33 percent of them do not have any incomes. The digital media have to please these people’s emotion and addiction. But consequently, health, youth protection and crime are becoming the problems.

"The arch bishop contemplated the gigantic cathedral for a time in silence, then he sighed and stretched out his right hand towards the printed book lying open on his table and his left hand towards Notre-Dame, and he looked sadly from the book to the church: `Alas,' he said, `this will kill that'....the book of stone, so solid and durable, would give way to the book of paper, which was more solid and durable still." The French novelist, Victor Hugo, in his Notre Dame de Paris was commenting on the emergence over 500 years ago of the printed book.

Today a similar scenario will be envisioned and debated at your next few years of study at Tsinghua. Will the new media kill the journalism? Will the journalism education survive the new media? Whether Dean Fan Jingyi’s Marxist journalism or Lee Miller’s American journalism? Will the mankind survive the new media?

I trust you would find an answer to it after your enlightening education here.

And hopefully you will also find the difference between “you know everything nothing” and “I know nothing about everything.”

The answer to the last question will not come until you have a correct attitude in your study:”I know nothing about everything.”

Thank you. Good luck to You.