In a discussion of early 20th-century China, the writer Lu Xun lamented how the Chinese, completely accustomed to their colonial status, had become “slave-faced.” Slave-faced is the expression of a person who is accustomed to being persecuted and lives by toadying to the powerful. It is the hollow expression of those who have lost the courage to think on their own about the condition they are in, of those who do not determine their own fates. That is “slave-faced.”