By Li Chengpeng (李承鹏)
【Editor’s Note: Li Chengpeng’s 2024 summary paints a grim portrait of modern China. As astrologers proclaimed a prosperous era, the nation faced relentless struggles. The birth rate plummeted, overshadowed by hardships surpassing wartime adversities. Tales of systemic exploitation surfaced: overworked laborers died unnoticed, charity leaders demanded favors, and schools fortified entrances against vehicular attacks. Economic woes deepened, with fines and layoffs exposing societal fragility. Amid government crackdowns, students and citizens expressing dissent were labeled mentally ill.
Symbolic optimism, like Li Ziqi’s pastoral videos, countered brutal realities: funeral homes exploiting remains and incidents of senseless violence targeting students and public spaces. Social loyalty warped into “remote devotion,” while fleeting anti-Japanese sentiments were manipulated for political convenience. The youth, constrained by systemic rigidity, offered no salvation. Like Orwell’s 1984, 2024 mirrored a fleeting snowflake—melting before leaving a mark, embodying a nation entrapped by cycles of despair and endurance.】
As 2024 drew to a close, astrologers around the globe leaped forth to proclaim that Pluto had left Capricorn for Aquarius, ushering in a twenty-year auspicious cycle. Yet the typically superstitious Chinese showed no reaction, for a life mired in hardship does not need zodiac signs. At the end of 2023, feng shui masters had gleefully announced that the Chinese would enter an era of "the Path Beyond 'Fire'" (离火运), only for the year to bring nothing but a relentless cycle of dispossession and deadly fires. Not a single person caught a whiff of good fortune.
Chinese people no longer believe in the luck of “mystery boxes”; they resign themselves to the fate they are born with, like an indelible birthmark. One day in Hangzhou (杭州), a delivery worker was found sleeping on the roadside, slumped over his electric scooter. People tried to rouse him, only to discover he had died from overwork. Camel Xiangzi (骆驼祥子) once tried to change his destiny through sheer diligence, yet perished on a roadside curb—his fate was sealed. Another day, a gravely ill young man arrived at the hospital beyond hope. When the doctor asked where he lived and whether his family could be notified, he replied, “No need. Dying here, in this bright hospital, is better than dying in my windowless basement. And don’t tell my father—it would be a waste of money on train tickets.” On yet another day, the mother of a child patient sought help from a charitable organization, only to be coerced into sleeping with the organization’s leader in exchange for a token promise of aid.
This year, it became fashionable not to have children, but driving cars into groups of students seemed to be all the rage. It also became common to witness entrepreneurs hauled off in a wave of "Cross-Border Hunt and Capture" (远洋捕捞). Meanwhile, funeral homes were caught stealing body parts and selling bones for cosmetic procedures—fake teeth, fake nasal bridges. This grim progression from birth to death was distilled into a single hapless day, offering no surprises beyond an intensification of that bleak refrain: “to be born, to survive, to die.”
It’s said that China’s current birth rate has fallen below what it was during the War of Resistance against Japan. Perhaps the pressures of modern life prove more merciless than enemy artillery. At a maternity hospital, Nurse Tan told me there were far fewer expectant mothers these days. In the past, you had to bribe the right people and slip them red envelopes just to get a bed. Now it’s all reversed: the hospital is scrambling to drum up business, offering promotions like “Have a baby, get a free stroller,” yet the patient numbers keep plummeting. No one dares to give birth. She also mentioned that, in an effort to adapt, the hospital rented out its first floor to a hot pot restaurant.
Jean-Henri Fabre, author of The Insects (昆虫记), teaches us that when the reproduction rate of insects like bees or ants takes a sudden, drastic dip, it often foreshadows outbreaks of plague, floods, food shortages, or even war. Of course, Fabre was studying the decadent and degenerate capitalist insects. Socialistic insects, with their heightened consciousness, are sure to mount a staunch struggle against “sexual downturns” and sentiments like “the last generation.” No matter how hard life gets, they should erupt in a population boom of countless tiny insects—and even tinier insects—because that’s simply what they must do.
Although it might be unseemly to emulate the “menstrual police” once found in the Soviet Union—who routinely investigated which citizens were evading their reproductive obligations—our own experts have admonished female college students: “Upon graduation, you should understand that having children is your duty.” It’s the logic of The Matrix: without enough human batteries, how will the nation generate power? Though life is grim, one can always take comfort in inspiring news stories: A pregnant mother toils at odd jobs with her baby on her back, a shining beacon of maternal devotion; a father delivers takeout while caring for his paralyzed child, exemplifying the responsibilities of manhood; a ninety-year-old grandmother who must sell goods on the street to support her sixty-year-old disabled son, showcasing the resilience of the Chinese elderly. As long as one’s forefathers weren’t court eunuchs for at least three generations, it’s possible to extol such heart-wrenching narratives as though they were triumphant, and every comment below these stories reads, “Stay strong, how moving!” One sees row upon row of clasped hands as though these human batteries deserve ongoing recharges for all their suffering.
This year, numerous schools installed rows of heavy stone pillars at their entrances to block oncoming vehicles. These “atomized rebels” come roaring in their cars, the adult offspring of twisted personalities whose own loss of hope leads them to destroy that of others. Cases of public killings also skyrocketed this year: an incident in Tai’an (泰安) where a school bus was rammed, leaving eleven dead; a brutal stabbing in a Shanghai mall in Songjiang (松江) that killed three; another in Xiaogan (孝感), Hubei Province, that took eight lives; a random killing spree in Fangcheng (防城), Guangxi, claiming five. Some have referred to these acts as “the Zhang Xianzhong mode,” but that’s an exaggeration. Zhang Xianzhong (张献忠) at least managed to repel government troops in an organized fashion and, contrary to legend, sometimes actually spared civilians. For instance, when he captured Fengyang, he executed the Prefect but distributed goods and grain to the poor; after taking Changsha, he suspended taxes for three years; upon seizing Xiangyang, he immediately disbursed one hundred thousand taels of silver to feed the starving. He even forbade his men to seize local women as wives and proclaimed the penalty of death for violators. Though he later descended into a monstrous, humanity-defying path, that’s another chapter of the tale. So, while people casually label today’s indiscriminate killers “Zhang Xianzhong,” a more serious look reveals they don’t deserve that moniker.
In Wuxi, a young man named Xu Jiajin (徐加金) from Wuxi Vocational College of Arts and Technology, angered by the school’s exploitation, cried out, “Long live the people, long live the proletariat,” only to avoid stabbing the dean—he instead hid in the bushes and murdered eight proletarian students, nearly all of them young women. Blood covered the ground, each drop steeped in the struggles of their parents. A few years back, Zheng Minsheng (郑民生), reeling from unemployment and heartbreak, ran to the gate of Nanping Experimental Elementary School early one morning, snatched up children at random, hacking away as he cursed, “If I can’t live, neither can you!” In fifty-five seconds of that rampage, he killed eight and injured seventeen. The eldest child was twelve; the youngest was six. Unemployment and a broken heart—what did that have to do with these kids?
Some among us harbor two destructive mindsets: first, whenever they see the powerful strutting about on the world stage, they believe it somehow adds to their own sense of might; second, whenever a terrorist slashes people in the street, they imagine it serves as some personal act of revenge on their behalf. It takes an astonishing degree of delusion to think that Prince Duan’s flourishes of bloody rags outside foreign embassies a century ago were akin to giving you a complimentary facial. And one’s mind must be filled with countless pig entrails to believe that the Boxers rampaging through Beijing would pause to retrieve your stolen rickshaw.
Instead of probing the causes that transform certain individuals into beasts, officialdom focuses on the so-called “Five Types of Problematic Individuals” and reintroduces the Fengqiao experience (枫桥经验). So, one day, a brand-new device appeared on the street: a “public mood stabilization testing machine.” And if someone’s mood fails that test, will they be lobotomized on the spot, like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? The deeper cause of all this can be glimpsed in these paired news stories:
An Italian named Andrea fell ill in Hainan (海南). His hospital bill was merely 24 RMB, and he left fully recovered, posting a video in gratitude: “China is amazing. Thank you, China. I can see now.” Meanwhile, in a separate clip, a husband accompanied his terminally ill wife to pick up her test results. Realizing they couldn’t afford her treatment, the wife—without a second thought—climbed over the hospital corridor’s windowsill and jumped to her death while her husband went to find a doctor.
The video ends there, but I imagine the husband returning to discover she’s gone. Would he then seek a random act of revenge? People keep losing their last vestige of soft spots, or perhaps those tender places are knives pointed at society.
Experts advise: “Avoid crowded places.” Yet, in places with sparse populations, one might still be robbed and murdered. Hiding at home risks collapsing buildings or gas explosions; on campus, one might get stabbed; on a plane, you might end up on that Eastern Airlines flight. Take the bus, and a landslide might hurl you into the day’s list of 48 fatalities. Drive your own electric car and risk spontaneous combustion—at least you’ll save on cremation costs. Eventually, you grasp the meaning of “The world is vast, yet there is nowhere for me to stand.”
As streets fill with carnage, Li Ziqi (李子柒) reemerges in a blaze of glory, offering videos of pastoral calm and refined abundance—an antidote to the disrepair of real rural life, rekindling faint hope through our smartphone screens. Li Ziqi is the perfect hedge fund against the brutality of daily life.
For a few days, people discussed “junk time”—and soon grew bored, passively watching a soccer match played as though it were water polo. Occasionally, a piece of nightmarish news breaks, like subway staff demanding proof from a man with no arms that he is, in fact, disabled. Or the Beijing municipal finance meeting proclaiming, “We must shatter the public’s assumption that money deposited in the bank belongs to them.” There’s nothing wrong with that statement. After all, storing your body in a funeral home doesn’t guarantee it remains your own, as we learned from the scandal in which 4,000 cadavers were sold for cosmetic profiteering. People have lost too many things they once believed belonged to them, yet they still hold faith that after death, they can rest in their own burial plot. In truth, you might imagine yourself nestled in your personal “chive pocket,” only to end up in someone else’s set of counterfeit dentures.
“Why do we live?” you ask. “Simply to keep scurrying between the streets, the office, and the construction site so that society seems faintly alive,” comes the reply. Life goes on. The wave of layoffs exposes the pseudo-middle class as utterly worthless. Most emblematic is the matchmaking corner in Shanghai’s People’s Square: once upon a time, prospective mothers-in-law demanded that their future sons-in-law earn at least thirty thousand RMB a month; now they ask for ten thousand. They used to allow mortgages; now, they prohibit any debt. These old Shanghai ladies are among the most adaptable creatures on earth.
Official rhetoric, meanwhile, champions “flexible employment,” ideally working three jobs a day, all while People’s Daily warns against “glamorizing hardship at the bottom.” One day in Zhumadian, an elderly man in his seventies was fined 55,000 RMB—later upheld in court—after selling just 12 RMB worth of vegetables to pay for his wife’s stroke treatments. Collapsing onto the ground, he wailed, “I sold twelve RMB of produce, and they fined me fifty-five thousand!” Another night, another elderly man froze to death at his street stall, losing a finger to the cold. Along the city streets, rows of ornamental trees stand swaddled in bright winter coats as if greeting incoming visitors.
Meanwhile, Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟) proudly addressed a university audience: “As you gaze at the stars, your hands should be dusty, your feet caked with mud.” She has no idea that the old man’s face and severed finger truly are smeared with dust and mud.
Social stability remains impeccable. Beijing’s Changping District quickly tore down a statue commemorating Li Zicheng (李自成) and his rebel army’s entry into the city. At a time when unemployment plagues every street, we certainly can’t have a broken soul glancing up to find a heroic role model. But there’s no need to raze anything: the Chinese capacity for endurance is unrivaled by any species on this planet. One netizen famously quipped, “Even animals on the African savanna don’t roam for so many hours every day in search of food. Throughout the animal kingdom, there’s no creature that puts in a daily ten-hour hunt like we do.”
One spark of indignation flared up when reports revealed that numerous sanitary napkin brands contained toxic materials. Women briefly raised their voices. Another protest erupted when municipalities proposed a plan to mortgage one’s house in exchange for pension benefits. Yet another flared up after revelations that tanker trucks were mixing cooking oil with kerosene. Before long, people ransacked the “Ri Qing” Oil Warehouse, suddenly remembering that it was no time to be anti-Japanese or fear nuclear-contaminated imports.
In times of economic slowdown, it’s practically protocol to whip up anti-Japanese fervor, which grew especially vehement this year. An ardent patriot killed a Chinese national who worked on a school bus at a Japanese school in Suzhou; on September 18—a date fraught with historical significance—another patriot killed a child of Chinese-Japanese heritage in Shenzhen. Throw in the “pee-on-Japan” stunts, and the once-ubiquitous anti-Japanese TV dramas from Hengdian have moved straight into real life. Meanwhile, in Chongqing, people who dare not confront the crooked execs of a gas company have the guts to shove two young women wearing kimonos along the riverside. On the one hand, they “accurately gauge who they can and cannot provoke,” and on the other, it reflects a centuries-old impulse to proclaim fealty. They know the emperor can’t see these displays from his high walls, but the very act of performing devotion from afar neutralizes their daily humiliation. They feel momentarily redeemed, radiating with a rosy glow, fancying themselves part of society’s mainstream. A psychologist ought to coin a term for this phenomenon—“remote loyalty,” perhaps.
Then, one day, an official directive is issued: Japanese seafood is once again safe to consume, so there’s no need to hate Japan for the time being. Those same patriots rush out to buy autumn mackerel and guzzle sake. Their hatred of Japan burns with hot fury even as they reach for Japanese eye drops. When will they hate Japan again? Please wait for further notice.
Xu Zidong (许子东) once told a story: one day, a production brigade secretary convened an emergency village meeting, solemnly announcing that President Nixon was coming to China. The villagers were stunned by the idea that their biggest enemy would be visiting. With revolutionary conviction, the secretary declared, “This time, we’ve decided not to kill him.” The crowd burst into thunderous applause.
That era of madness has returned. And speaking of madness, a student in Yunnan charged onto the stage to expose the dilapidated conditions of school dormitories—neglected while funds were diverted to build a lavish “Anna Cottage”—and was swiftly classified as mentally ill. Li Mouxue (李某雪), who accused an auxiliary police officer of sexual assault, was repeatedly institutionalized. An individual filing a petition was admitted to a psychiatric ward, and the mother who spoke on his behalf followed shortly thereafter. The entire country has become an asylum, where those who refuse to comply are labeled insane.
This year also witnessed the emergence of a distinctive new agency with a distinctly surreal vibe: the “Police-Tax Joint Combat Center.” The shock of such a name makes every business owner wake up each morning feeling like a criminal, silently counting the days of a hypothetical sentence. Evidently, those in tall hats find the conventional labels for taxes lacking in vigor. They prefer something more direct—“distant-water fishing.” They roam from one province to the next, bundling up entrepreneurs in sacks and hauling them away. Lei Jun once had an associate who developed a poker app; the poor man was spirited off and later found dead. But none of this is truly new: between 1953 and 1956, the country conducted a nationwide retroactive taxation spree, known as the “Three-Anti and Five-Anti Campaigns,” driving countless bosses to jail or suicide. History offers nothing new—so act accordingly.
In Let the Bullets Fly (《让子弹飞》), after collecting 99 years’ worth of taxes, Ge You’s character muses, “Who are you taking money from—the poor? They have none.” Jiang Wen’s character replies, “If we must tax, let’s tax the wealthy.” Both are naïve. “Poor” or “rich” hardly matters: besides these so-called distant-water expeditions, the government in 2024 issued fifty-year ultra-long-term bonds. Imagine the year 2074: rumors say that by 2050, humanity will have achieved immortality—so maybe the idea of repaying or not repaying these bonds won’t matter. We might already be living in a utopia. For all we know, those unidentified flying objects hovering over New Jersey could end up on the Spring Festival Gala, with extraterrestrials delivering a glitzy medley of songs. The host might breathlessly announce, “Our lizard soldiers stationed on Titan send their New Year greetings via quantum phone!”
Back to reality: when it comes to technology, the country oscillates between folksy arts-and-crafts demonstrations—hand-rubbing a five-nanometer chip—and mind-boggling quantum computing hype. Look, Master Shi Yongxin (释永信大师) visited a rocket launch site, bestowing a Shaolin blessing on the rocket with his Yi Jin Jing. Never fear Elon Musk or Jensen Huang; we have our own core innovations. Zhu Yunhe (朱韵和) once recounted an anecdote: back in the day, Hunan’s Yingcheng County tried to boost agricultural productivity by building a fertilizer plant. Local cadres ordered all households to bring out every cooking pot they owned and line them up in the streets. People poured their urine into more than two hundred pots, setting them aflame to boil down the fluid into urea. The spectacle was majestic, the aroma drifting all the way to the county seat—an almost intimidating display of mass fervor, with Director Feng’s voice echoing in the sky: “Anyone else…?”
Yes, home prices in Shenzhen have been cut in half, leading residents to gloat over Hong Kong’s decline. They’re gleeful that more Hong Kongers are crossing the border to buy groceries. Never mind that they’ve lost Asia’s third-largest financial hub; who cares, as long as there’s a new produce market. This mindset is exceedingly provincial. At least, this year’s Nobel laureate in Economics delivered a timely conceptual shower: it is production relations, not production forces, that decide our destiny. So, the country has two paths: emulate certain political systems or emulate certain technologies. The first would threaten entrenched interests; the second would inevitably hit a structural wall. Reflect a bit, and you’ll recall that in the twilight of the Qing Dynasty, Guo Songtao (郭嵩焘) said something similar. Mastering technology might take three to five decades while escaping the deep maladies inherited since the Qin and Han Dynasties might require three centuries.
People overlooked a minor event on February 18, 2024, when Hunan launched a “Great Debate on Liberating the Mind.” It ended inconclusively. A savvy observer asked, “How do you liberate the mind while keeping it unified? How do you boost consumption without boosting incomes? How do you expand foreign trade while fixated on anti-Japanese, anti-American policies? How do you reassure entrepreneurs with distant-water fishing in full swing? How do you increase the birth rate amidst high housing costs and low wages?”
In 1867, Zeng Guofan (曾国藩) met with Zhao Liewen (赵烈文) behind closed doors, discussing the hordes of beggars and the widespread pillaging and chaos. Zhao declared that the empire was rotting from within and would fall in under fifty years. Zeng replied that he did not wish to witness the collapse of the Qing and prayed only for death. A few years later, he died. It is hard to be an official, harder still to be a loyal official, and hardest of all to be a loyal official who tries to accomplish genuine good. One wonders if a certain statesman who once vowed that “The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers will never reverse their course” knew of this historical parallel as he lay on his deathbed.
At year’s end, two odd phenomena cropped up: Christmas activities—long deemed “traitorous”—were suddenly permitted, and authorities even encouraged bigger, brighter Christmas trees. At the same time, People’s Daily and Global Times launched a joint campaign soliciting essays on “Stories of Sino–U.S. Friendship and Cooperation.” There you have it—another official notice from on high. When the government needs you, you step up; when it doesn’t, you stand aside. But it’s too late; confidence has withered. The wealthy are redoubling their efforts to leave.
Over dinners marked by ever more frugal menus, in business meetings gone nowhere, and in bedrooms devoid of intimacy, people speculate about what the future might hold. The Crowd (乌合之众) once suggested that how a nation educates its youth reveals its future. When Bangladeshi youths take to the streets in protest, and Korean youths take to the streets to thwart a presidential crackdown, Chinese college students queue twenty kilometers to bike to Kaifeng for a bowl of soup dumplings. We so-called liberals find ourselves inexplicably moved, praising the spirit of youth and glimpsing hope for tomorrow.
We forget these young minds have been repeatedly scrubbed with high-grade detergent, leaving them no different at the core from prior generations. Their mental circuitry is still inscribed with the single phrase “the standard answer.” More than ten million students graduate from Chinese universities each year, crowding onto the streets. Some wear Kong Yiji (孔乙己) robes; some wave anti-Japanese banners, some harbor concealed blades, and some believe Newton plagiarized the Yongle Encyclopedia. That is the future. In the midst of this ocean of youth, one law student in Shaanxi quietly replaced a temple’s QR code on the donation box with his own, reaping a steady stream of “virtuous money” until he was caught. It’s the only story of the year that offers a faint trace of dark humor.
Don’t expect the youth to save the country. Don’t imagine that those born after 2000 differ from us. Soon enough, their convoys to Kaifeng for soup dumplings will give way to motorbikes for food deliveries until they keel over from exhaustion by the roadside, just like that middle-aged man at the beginning. When they grow older, they might be dancing in some public square before a car mows them down in a random act of vengeance. A netizen once circulated an early interview with Feng Jie (凤姐), who said that from the time she was a little girl, she knew she was a peasant, that her children would be peasants, and that their children would be peasants, too—an unchangeable fate. She grasped this at age nine, well before she even reached puberty. College students at our so-called top universities, who fancy themselves elites, will never understand such a truth. Of course, there will always be young souls who strive for freedom, who fling themselves forward in pursuit of their dreams, even if it means being crushed to pieces—until one day, they realize reality is an endless, towering wall, or perhaps a Möbius loop with no exit.
In George Orwell’s 1984 (《1984》), the novel ends with Winston ceasing to run or shout. He finds himself back in the Ministry of Love, forgiven of all his sins, his soul white as snow.
Our 2024 is like a humble snowflake that dissolves on your face in an instant, so swiftly that you barely feel a chill.
Li Chengpeng (李承鹏), December 29, 2024, in Tokyo (东京)
This translation is an independent yet well-intentioned effort by the China Thought Express editorial team to bridge ideas between the Chinese and English-speaking worlds. The original text is available on WeChat. Kindly attribute the translation if referenced.