[I genuinely forgot to do the blog post last night—I have no excuses. I had a friend over at my house, and it just entirely skipped my mind. To make up for it: If there is any aspect of Chinese society you’re curious about, any cultural context you don’t get from one of the previous weibo posts—go ahead and ask your question below this! I’ll pick out a couple of questions and write up an explanation of how things work in China!]
Someone asks, “A sincere question for single children—do you really feel lonely? Do you want siblings? What kind of trouble have you run into while growing up that makes you want siblings? My kiddo is 16 months now, a boy, and people around me have been asking me when I want to go for a second. I’m trying to decide if that’s the right option for me. My in-laws aren’t very well off, so they can’t give me any support, monetarily or as baby sitters. I’m a full-time house wife, my husband runs a business. Our situation is stable enough. I know that if I have a second, whether it’s a boy or a girl, I have to be fair to them both. If boys get a bride price, girls need a dowry, and that’s going to drastically reduce our standard of living. For myself, I’d originally only planned to be a housewife for three years, but if I have a second child, then I’ll probably never go back to work again. I want a high standard of living. I want to travel. I want to shop. I’m not a single child, I don’t know how lonely single children get. I don’t know if my kiddo will resent me when he grows up.”
Comments reply, “Not lonely at all. Being a single child is fucking awesome.”
Four men and one woman committed suicide together jumping off of a cliff in Shangjiajie. The youngest of them was 23, the oldest 34. The four men died on the spot. The woman was prevented from jumping, but she’d taken poison beforehand, and died later due to poisoning. They were all in a group chat together and had planned this suicide together. One of them is named Peng Zhijun, who grew up in the poorest family in the village. While most people were living in multi-storey family homes, Peng Zhijun’s house was only one storey, with no refrigerator, no TV, no cabinets, not even a slanted roof. And it leaked all the time.
Like most young people in the village, Peng Zhijun dropped out before he’d even completed middle school to start working. They all went to a construction site near Tianjin, doing work like painting walls and ceilings. Slept in the worker’s dormitories, 4 bunkbeds to a room, going to an outhouse for their business.
Peng Zhijun was a slow worker, very thin, very quiet, easily ignored. And construction is a very boring job. He needed to wake up at 6am every day, go to work by 6:30am, eat lunch at noon, and keep working until he had done 10 hours a day. It’s a very dirty job and very lonely. All the workers from the same village would go out eating, drinking, or gaming at an internet cafe regularly, but Peng Zhijun almost never joined them.
The other villagers were satisfied with the work—it paid 8-9K a month. They almost never quit. But Peng Zhijun did. And the next time anyone say him, he was wearing a suit, with a fancy hairdo, he’d even dyed his hair blue. People asked, and he said that he had started working as a hairdresser, which everyone found very bizarre. Because hairdressing only paid 3K a month. His friend was worried about him, because he wasn’t married yet and his family is very poor, but in the end, nobody persuaded him to go back to construction work.
Everyone in the village knows that Peng Zhijun has no hope of getting married. His father was in his seventies already. When he was young, he was quite capable—in addition to growing crops, he also knew how to fix houses. He used to ride around on a motorcycle all day with a little megaphone looking for work until 7-8pm at night. Because a house is a must for men who want to get married in the village, Peng Zhijun’s dad gave his house to his oldest son—Peng Zhijun’s older brother—for his marriage. And then with hard work and taking out a loan, he built a simple brick house for Peng Zhijun.
But ten years ago, Peng Zhijun’s dad started getting too old to keep working. Because Peng Zhijun was too poor to marry, his dad lived with him. When Peng Zhijun’s older brother got married, the bride price was only 20-30K. But by the time Peng Zhijun’s looking for marriage, it had risen to over 200K plus a house in the city, which would cost another several hundred thousand. Nowadays, the moment you get married, you have to start saving money for your children.
No one even introduced any dates to Peng Zhijun. He was at the bottom of the dating pool, with no house in the big city and no steady job. This made him feel a lot of shame. Every time he’d encounter someone in the village, he’d duck his head and walk away quickly, avoiding eye contact.
The last time that Peng Zhijun contacted his friend was last year, when he’d suddenly asked to borrow a couple hundred dollars as “travel expenses”. His friend lent him 100 RMB, and he never paid it back.
If a similarity had to be found between these young people, it’s probably poverty and constant disasters in their lives. The girl was named Chen Ting, from Sichuan. She was also remembered as very small, thin, and quiet. She was very shy—when she was told off by the teachers, she never talked back. She’d only complain behind the teacher’s back. Her friend says that she didn’t appear to be an introvert though—she liked to laugh, she enjoyed bad jokes, and she always wanted to help people.
She had bad grades though, and to improve their graduation rate, the middle school she was in talked a lot of lower end students into dropping out. Chen Ting was one of them. After that, her mom found her a job working in beauty. She was only 16 then, and spent the next several years making her way through Neijiang, Chengdu, and Guangdong. Her mother wasn’t any help to her—they owned little more than a third of an acre of land which they’d rented out to someone else. Her mother worked in a sweatshop with her dad and made 50K to 60K a year. But last year, her dad got diagnosed with cancer and the treatment is very expensive. Chen Ting worked at a spa, making commission. In a good month, she made 5K a month. She had called her family, she said that she’s not going to be getting a base wage anymore, it’ll be entirely commission, and she wants to quit to look for something that pays better.
The last time she called her family was the 1st of April, when she told her mother that she’d arrived in Chengdu and not to worry. She said that a good friend of hers is getting her a job, she’s got a roommate, and it’s all lined up. This friend was her classmate through primary and middle school and was her best friend, so her mother didn’t ask too many questions.
Zhang Cairui is only 3 months older than Chen Ting and is also from a poor family. Over a decade ago, his parents had divorced. Zhang Cairui’s father is in his fifties, and is fourth in 6 siblings. Because they’re too poor, his uncles in their forties are still not married. Most families in their village had crowdfunded their way to buying a house in the city, but all of his uncles still lived together in a single house in the village with exposed bricks.
It was only on the day of the suicide that Liu Zhiyong’s family found out through a call by the police. His aunt said that everybody couldn’t believe it. Just last month, he’d taken 3-4 days off of work and visited his dad. This was one of the few times he’d returned to his hometown after leaving for work—it was to the point that most people couldn’t even recognise this 34-year-old, almost middle-aged man.
Liu Zhiyong’s hometown was near Zhoukou, Henan. His village didn’t get above the absolute poverty line until 2018. He had an older and a younger sister, who were both married. His mother had passed away over two decades ago, and several years ago, his father had suffered a stroke and couldn’t move anymore. His grandma is in her nineties, and lived with her son in a single storey old house, farming a 300 square metre field.
Liu Zhiyong left home at 16-17 to start working. The villagers say that he almost never comes back, didn’t even hold a wedding party in the village. His wife is from Guangdong, and there are a lot of rumours that she wears the pants in the relationship. His own aunt says that he rarely contacts family and she doesn’t know much about his life—only that he met his wife in the sweatshop that they worked in together, that they’d gotten a divorce, and that his ex-wife had gotten custody. He’s dated once after that, but apparently it was some kind of con. The last time he returned home, he told his family that he wanted to travel for a bit. “He looked a little depressed, but he didn’t say anything else.” his aunt said.
Comments say, “There are too many depressed people in this country.”
Someone posts a photo of their husband and child and writes, “I can put up with my husband being ugly, but I cannot stand my baby being ugly. Every morning, I wake up to two hideous faces.”
Comments underneath say, “Your mother-in-law had a better looking baby than you did, actually.”
“What, you didn’t think about this before you got married?”
A tiktok video showing identical twins, one of which was raised by their mom, one of which is raised by the grandmother. Internet commenters say, “The one on the right was raised by grandma.”
Under the trending topic #Guangdong is the province with the most babies, a blogger says, “I’m from Guangdong, and this is absolutely correct. The root cause is sexism. In some cases, it’s that people insist on having kids until they have a boy. In some cases, one boy isn’t enough and they want minimum two boys. I’m not even married yet and a lot of my peers have three kids already.”
People’s News covers that Jiangsu Department of Education has issued a statement requiring that schools with uniforms must enforce that purchasing uniforms must be entirely voluntary, and there should not be any action taken to force students to buy uniforms. The news puts together a pool asking people whether they think uniforms for primary or middle schools are necessary.
Comments say, “Well, obviously uniforms are necessary, but there needs to be a lot stricter enforcement on quality and price. It can’t become a tool for making profit.”
Love this blog! How much of of weibo is rural vs big city?
This is a great Substack. I have a couple questions:
Sometimes you refer to something by a Western social media equivalent, e.g. referring to 'an askreddit thread'. What are the actual sites in these cases? I know a handful of Chinese social media sites, but not well enough to translate the names in my head on reading.
Kind of harder question, but I've seen some real Hot Takes on here that seem like they might have been satirical, but the very detached context you present them makes it hard to tell, especially coming from a radically different society. I'm particularly thinking of the take that testosterone levels/sperm count were decreasing because too many men were manual labourers. When you're translating humour/satire, how do you approach and contextualize it? Or have they *all* been sincere Hot Takes, strange as some might be?