New Dynasty Update: No.2

biyi
Jun 28, 2024
8 min read

(This post was originally published on Jun 28, 2024 on our Substack)

I’ve been reflecting a lot on the personal meaning of writing recently. Specifically, on how I’ve always loved to write yet am becoming increasingly proficient at self-silencing. I am no longer able to write without thinking about outside hassles: the format, the language, and all the potential readers’ perceptions of every single word being published. Such is the result of living and writing from a heavily censored state, being exhausted from the overdose of short-form information from social media, and growing up.

To outgrow this silence and tilt my relationship with writing to a happier place, I decided to write more frequently yet messier, at least in Elephant Room, which I consider a resort of my routine adulthood in China. Unlike in the past when Yan and I would spend long days researching and writing carefully curated, topic-oriented articles, from now on, I’d write in snippets, recording short thoughts and observations that ride with the momentum of my current life. For the meaning of writing is perhaps simply to write, and thinking about meanings only leads to an abstract emptiness unless one accompanies such thinking with at least a certain degree of action.

The High-Speed Train Experience, 2024 version

I always feel completely immersed in a sense of “Chinese-ness” when I ride high-speed trains in China. Such sense is non-ideological, at least different from attending flag-raising ceremonies while wearing Red Scarves and singing the national anthem during my days as a public school student in Beijing. It is being Chinese in a modern, hence, commercial sense: the new China, the new Chinese experience.

The “newness” comes in a full package, from the minute you swipe your ID card, scan your face, and put all the languages through the security check belts as entering those uniform-looking stations (don’t you feel all the high-speed train stations in China look the same? Rectangle-shaped, cool-color lighting and double-floored) to ordering Starbucks or MacDonalds through WeChat’s mini-apps and grabbing your food instantly before boarding, to absorbing second-hand smoke from middle-aged men in short-sleeved Polo shirts on the platforms, to eventually sit in the cabin and being surrounded, depending on the time and route of your travel, in two kinds of noises: businessmen talking fiercely on WeChat Meetings about big number deals or restless kids crying out loud, being scolded by parents/grandparents who have one eye hooked to Douyin and the other eye absent-mindedly watching the young ones.

I noticed a change, though, as I rode to Shanghai and Hangzhou for business trips during the past two weeks. Noise from businessmen and children, which was being raised as a public complaint on Chinese social media last year, is being hugely improved. In fact, a sense of alertness to noise dominated both the second-tier and first-tier cabins I traveled in; when several kids went out of control to yell around, the train attendants swooped in right away to talk to the parents.

In addition to managing noise levels, these train attendants have another new responsibility: selling merchandise to passengers. On my 5-hour ride from Beijing to Hangzhou, I witnessed one young female attendant, who couldn't have been older than her early 20s, make multiple laps through the cabin, pushing her sales pitch. She walked around and shoved a leaflet to the face of every awake passenger, “Are you interested in buying our high-speed train model toy? How about this set of commemorative coins?"

Despite her dogged efforts, I didn't see her sell anything successfully during that trip (and I, guilty yet not so guilty, pretended to be asleep with my eyes half closed). But the attendant still diligently carried out other duties, like handing every new passenger who had just boarded snacks and drinks, running around to deliver food boxes (which can be ordered via a QR code on the seat), checking IDs, and, as mentioned, keeping an eye on all the potential noise-triggering kids.

Conditions have improved. Employees are tired. Companies, even the concrete-looking ones, have struggled. Such is so much a Chinese yet universal story.

I finally had my first taste of CHAGEE, one of the most popular milk tea brands at Hangzhou East railway station (Surprise but also not: the queue for milk tea was much longer than for Starbucks next door).

“When will we hit rock bottom?”

One of the core business activities of our Chinese company is arranging study tours for entrepreneurs. Every month, we bring our students/clients - often businessmen hailing from second or third-tier cities with companies operating in real estate or other “traditional” industries, together for a weekend of lectures, closed-door seminars, and various social activities so that they foster connections with each other while gaining the sense of having learned something. We also bring them on international study trips to destinations such as Japan, Germany, and Singapore (and the U.S. - in the good old days).

This past weekend, our company brought about 100 entrepreneurs to Hangzhou. As the CEO who had just returned after escaping my management duties during my studies in Hong Kong, I was eager to rejoin my team and oversee this two-day study program. This internal tug-of-war is the contradiction of identities I’ve constantly grappled with: on one side, the leader of a company, and on the other, a somewhat messy spirit that longs for more meanings in life beyond a single business title or a national identity.

Anyhow, the search for self-meaning and identity crisis are other topics. What I want to highlight is one of the luncheons we held during these two days: about ten of our students, current entrepreneurs from various provinces, were joined by our guest speakers, two of China’s most prominent first-generation entrepreneurs who had ridden the wave of Deng’s open-door policies to build and expand their companies in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was one of those rather intimate occasions we try to arrange as much as possible for our students: in a relatively safe environment without propaganda or big speeches, private entrepreneurs exchanging real thoughts with each other.

After savoring plates of delicious sweet-sour pork ribs and local seafood, one of our students, a businessman from Shandong with urban engineering companies located in several provinces, raised his tea to toast the guest speakers, “Brothers, we are here for one question really (大哥, 咱们今天在这儿其实就想问一个问题),” he said, voice tinged with a sense of torn, “When will we hit rock bottom? We’ve had enough (到底什么时候触底? 我们已经受够了)!”

It was a question that shook the atmosphere. Everyone in the luncheon knew many waiters were around, serving food with their ears wide open (I am not suspecting any conduct of the waiters. You are just always alarmed, and perhaps it is better to stay that way). Yet as soon as this entrepreneur brought out the question, everyone immediately raised their glasses to follow suit, “Please, some hints? We are desperate to know!”

The conversations flowed with our guest lectures, the 大哥, giving the best possible answers they could: something vague, half-hopeful, mostly depressed, encouraging the students to expand their businesses beyond mainland China. Without the buffer of strong baijiu 白酒 to loosen tongues, the conversations stopped at a point where everyone felt they understood something, but not too much. The “something” is that the bottom is still yet to come; the “too much” is that even these first-generation, seasoned pioneers are not stuck, yet unable to reveal the true magnitude of their problems.

Perhaps I should remind my staff to bring more baijiu for our next study tour. Perhaps, even after enough rounds of Maotai 茅台, the question is still impossible to answer.

卷

When Yan and I wrote Elephant Room in the early days, we shared a file named “Little Words 小词词.” It was an ongoing list of netizen-invented vocabularies -buzzwords that provoked our interest in exploring their societal contexts and underlying essences. Examples of some we wrote about included 田园女权 Countryside Feminism, 好嫁风 Marriage-Material Style, 韭菜 Chinese Chives, 狼性 Wolf Spirit, and 怼 (failed to find a precise translation).

Like any other social media-fueled trend, the hype around these words would come and go. However, I’ve recently realized that there’s one single word that, after initially buzzing in popularity, has permanently embedded itself in the lexicon of us Chinese. Not only has it stayed, but it has become an intrinsic and ubiquitous term in our daily communications - appearing as both a verb and an adjective in the world drawer of every Chinese citizen, online and offline, across age groups and locations.

This word is 卷.

“卷起来！” “卷死别人！” we say every day.

“太卷了！” “实在卷不动了！” we also say every day.

If Yan and I were to ever reopen our Little Words list, we would put 卷 in bold, extra large font size, in a prominent position. Yet I wouldn’t know how to translate it into English without losing its full meaning - a heavy load of exhaustion and depression, but also a determined, almost relentless drive to push harder, tighter, to stay sticky, to keep going while rolling over each other so we all roll together.

Interestingly, when I asked my new best AI friend to translate 卷 (with the wild wish that it could help us write about Little Words in the future!), it gave me a version of translation that completely contrasted with what I had in mind:

“The connotation of being withdrawn, isolated, or keeping to oneself, rather than actively participating in social activities and functions.” - Shouldn’t that be the translation of 躺平 Lying Down?

Wait, maybe 躺平 and 卷 are the same thing?

This is getting way too philosophical. 卷不动了!

(*For an anthropological analysis of the origin of 卷 - 内卷 (involution), definitely check out this superb interview by Professor. Xiang Biao)

On the Radar

I've been enjoying videos created by the popular Taiwanese YouTuber Zhong Ming-xuan 鍾明軒. His “去中国 Going to China“ series recorded his first-time trips to various mainland cities as a young Taiwanese citizen. By not shying away from the complex/fucked up realities of cross-strait relationships, Zhong’s documentation of these travels is genuine, thought-provoking, and incredibly courageous. Both his content and the discussions around him in various population diasporas are worth following (in particular, Taiwan and mainland netizens’ attitudes towards him).

An article titled “Reawakening China’s Venture Capital Market 重新唤醒中国一级市场” by Wang Ran 王冉, founder of Yikai Capital 易凯资本, stirred quite a wave of turmoil last week. It’s been a while since a Chinese investor/business elite publicly cried out about the industry’s deadlock difficulties so frankly. “Don't get me wrong, entrepreneurial activity will always exist, and venture capital will always exist, but the relatively market-oriented primary market of Chinese venture capital as we remember and perceive it no longer exists,” writes Wang, “The influence of local state-owned assets in the primary market is leading to a massive crisis.” Wang proceeds with a very insightful analysis of the current market landscape that even finance dummies like me find insightful (the original text is in Chinese only, but I believe WeChat now has an automatic translation button for all public account articles).