Elephant Diet Vol.2
- Kat
- Sep 19
- 6 min read
Biyi’s Dish—
by Positive Connections (正面连接), a new media brand that focuses on non-fiction and feature stories highlighting important yet underreported topics, and seeks to present contemporary China through the lens of Chinese people and their narratives.
"In 2023, I graduated from graduate school and joined a provincial branch of a state-owned enterprise in my hometown, working in a management department free from performance targets. It was a job that people considered ‘stable, respectable, and stress-free,’ a guaranteed ‘iron rice bowl.’ In September 2024, I had been working in the News and Publicity department of this state-owned enterprise for over a year. I considered most of what I did to be ‘shit work’ that produced no real value. Only recently did I realize that I held power and that I could use it to influence the situations of my colleagues.”
For most Chinese people outside the system and foreigners, China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and central enterprises are silent giants. Those within rarely speak out, while outsiders are filled with curiosity and prejudice but have few real channels to gain true understanding.
This article provides a small opening into this world. The author, a young man who resigned after more than two years at a state-owned enterprise, shares the myriad details of his work—often trivial, yet seemingly difficult to dismiss as entirely worthless. He was responsible for online “ideological management,"(意识形态管控) overseeing the social media accounts of various subsidiaries and sales points, monitoring their content to ensure there were no "ideological risks." When this grand goal translates into daily tasks, it means endless negotiations with the leadership of the Party Building Department and struggling day after day in a quagmire of formalism to find personal value—painful, yet ironically filled with a sense of despairing amusement.
Joyce’s Dish —
The County Girl in a Harvard Lab: Latecomer in the Meritocracy Game (县城女孩在哈佛实验室：优绩游戏里的迟到者)
by Polar Day Workshop (极昼工作室), a Chinese publication that aims to “offer an alternative for those dedicated to serious reading.”
Born in a county in Central Hunan province, Chen Xueqiu, using a pseudonym, described her younger self as “unremarkable,” with “average grades” throughout her elementary and junior high school years.
After three years’ hard work in high school, this county girl earned her place at a public university in the U.S. to study accounting in 2017. In 2021, she got into her dream school, the University of Southern California, to pursue data science. Last September, she secured a spot in the corner of a Harvard lab, gazing out at Boston's iconic red brick buildings.
Yet, this feel-good story took a sour turn in June when news of layoffs struck the lab as $2.2 billion in research funding from the U.S. government was frozen, affecting her lab’s projects.
As the youngest member of the team, the newcomer worried about being among those to be laid off. The girl from a small town, who has been tirelessly finding ways to stay in the U.S. over the past eight years, had to start job hunting once again. Meanwhile, the family debt incurred for her overseas studies loomed large as their business struggled during the pandemic era.
Under this dual pressure, Chen looked back on her journey from her small town to Harvard and found out she had always been a step behind those with advantages over her, regardless of her hard work. And she found the cruel answer in the book The Tyranny of Merit. “They have been elites since childhood; I’m just an elite on Xiaohongshu (RedNote),” she self-mockingly noted.
In Chen’s story, I see generations of Chinese parents molding kids into the ideal selves they never became, a swath of well-behaved Chinese kids pushing themselves to meet their parents’ expectations, and a vast pool of diverse talent reduced to cookie-cutter degree holders, all caught in an endless “rat race” in an increasingly competitive society.
Would love to hear what you see in the county girl at Harvard: )
Kat’s Dish—
Twenty Years of China’s Human Rights Lawyers: Walking the Straight Path, Keeping the Flame of Rule of Law Alive (中国人权律师二十年：直道而行，法治火种摇曳不灭)
by WOMEN(我们), a Chinese community committed to documenting contemporary Chinese history, free from the constraints of internet censorship within the “Great Firewall.”
This article is not about a recent "hot topic," but rather highlights numerous unresolved issues in China that need to be continuously reviewed and updated. In China, journalism often requires moving beyond the strict principle of timeliness.
The article I’m sharing traces the stories of human rights lawyers in China, focusing on the nationwide crackdown on them. It covers human rights abuses that have occurred over the past two decades.
The development of human rights lawyers in China is closely related to the media boom, the opening of the internet, and legal reforms between 2000 and 2013. It is also tightly connected to the social conflicts brought on by China's rapid urbanization.
Lawyers like Gao Zhisheng, Li Heping, Jiang Tianyong, Tang Jitian, and Wang Yu have directly engaged with political and religious cases that are considered “red lines” by China’s Communist Party (CCP). They not only litigate but also use social media, sit-ins, protest signs, and performance art to fight for procedural justice, drawing public attention to wrongful convictions, such as the Jiansanjiang case, the Leping case, and the Qing'an shooting case.
The turning point came with the “709 Crackdown” —over 300 lawyers and citizens across the country were detained or summoned since July 9, 2015. This took place when the CCP, under Xi Jinping, was tightening its ideological grip over the whole Chinese society, alongside “Seven Don't Mentions” for college teachers, internal warnings to its cadres — known as “No. 9 Document” — against “Western forces hostile to China and dissidents within the country” who are “constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere,” and a new National Security Law. The aim was to suppress civil society in one sweeping action, affecting media, NGOs, religion, and academia.
Since then, many lawyers have been imprisoned, tortured, had their licenses revoked, and been surveilled even after their release. Some faced forced evictions, while others saw their children barred from schooling. Some were forced into exile, separated from their families for extended periods.
This article is not only a two-decade history of the lawyers community but a testament to how Chinese civil society has struggled to preserve its memory and dignity under the extreme pressure. As one quote in the article aptly states:
“Who speaks of victory? To endure is all.”
The stories of human rights lawyers are records of those who refuse to let the flame of hope to be extinguished in the face of adversity.
Lily’s Dish—
New National Guidelines on Lunch Napping: Can Students Finally Get better Sleep?” (午休出了“新国标”，中小学生能睡个好觉了吗？)
by The Paper (澎湃新闻), a state-run Chinese newspaper based in China’s cosmopolitan city Shanghai
After moving from mainland China to Hong Kong for work, one thing I just couldn’t get used to was our lunch break setting, which is has only one hour, barely enough time to eat, let alone nap. My local colleagues in Hong Kong, though, seem to have completely evolved beyond the need for a midday snooze. They come back from meal chatting and laughing, totally immune to food comas.
While I grew up with mandatory naptime all the way from kindergarten to high school. At my first internship in a mainland tech company, lights were switched off during 1 PM to 2 PM. Lots of colleagues had foldable beds next to their office desks—complete with blankets and eye masks—all set for a proper lie-down nap. In other companies I served later, soft music would chime around 1:30 or 2 PM to gently signal that, naptime is was over.
In this way, I’ve basically been hardwired to sleep at noon, like most of my friends from mainland. Napping is such a big deal in China as we can see in this article, that recently the government even rolled out a national standard on how to do it right. One interesting idea they introduced is “lie-flat” desks — a special design that lets students recline and rest without rearranging the classroom furnitures. With such equipments, everyone can nap at the same time.
However, many schools were already way ahead of the curve. Some had installed foldable cabinet-style bed units on both sides of the classroom, which tuck away neatly and can flip down into comfy napping cots at noon.
Hope you enjoyed this month’s Elephant Diet. See you in our next story!
The Elephant Room team🐒
（*While the Elephant Room team carefully selects content from credible news outlets and media, we cannot independently verify every piece of information it contains. If you believe any material infringes on copyrights or contains factual errors, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us so that it can be reviewed and, if necessary, removed🙏）
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