When an Anxious Serial Entrepreneur Meets a Zhihu Star

After Chuangyejia, Luoji Siwei, Guaijie and other projects, Shen Yin seems to have lost his sense of what life is for. Can a psychological counselor help him find it again?

Before he began churning out new-media projects, Shen Yin was editor-in-chief of Chuangyejia (Entrepreneur) magazine. Since leaving print, he has done a great deal: he produced Manzi Digest, planned the talk show Kaizi Says with former CCTV host Wang Kai, co-founded Luoji Siwei with Luo Zhenyu, and ran the reality show Guaijie on his own. The most successful of these was Luoji Siwei, but as you will see below, he and Luo Zhenyu eventually parted ways over differences in philosophy.

Shen Yin's latest project is called "Jingxiang" (Mirror Image), and it includes a series of online videos titled Since We're Here. Search for the show online and what you find looks a lot like Laoniangjiu on Shanghai's Dragon TV. Shen Yin may not agree, but as entertainment the two share much the same core: what viewers mostly watch is gossip. Since We're Here simply swaps the neighborhood-committee-style arbitration panel for a professional psychological counselor, and the weeping, snot-streaked parties to a dispute for rational, restrained young office workers. Shen Yin's show does have some youthful touches, of course: a wall of labels, big on-screen captions in the style of Kangxi Coming, and a director brought in from variety television.

One big draw is Li Songwei. In the four episodes aired so far, he is the professional counselor. Shen Yin seats him in a studio to talk one-on-one with a guest in front of a camera. Each episode runs 40 minutes, closer to a documentary or a reality show. The four episodes released on Tencent Video so far have drawn more than 1.3 million views.

"This time we've finally made a product with more female users than male users (laughs). It's quite interesting," Shen Yin told QDaily. More female users is good news: in investors' terms, it suggests the product's future users will be more willing to buy and will buy more often.

Jingxiang's official account describes itself in slightly clumsy terms: "This is a new-media experiment that invites young people to take part in actively exploring our inner worlds. It presents the troubles and predicaments of young people's lives."

Li Songwei talking with a guest on the show

A promotional image for the show

Shen Yin

Li Songwei holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from Peking University and now teaches at Tsinghua University's psychology center. He is also a big name on Zhihu, or in Zhihu's own phrase, a "ten-thousand-upvote answerer."

He earned the title like this. In 2012, Li Songwei was writing his doctoral dissertation and was very anxious, so he went on Zhihu to answer questions as a way of procrastinating. Procrastination plus patient answers won him more than 200,000 followers on Zhihu, and he later published an e-book, Beyond One Hour.

Before working with Shen Yin, Li Songwei's world was mostly confined to campus. "Back then I just hung around universities. I'm not good with words in daily life, and I even had some social anxiety. When Shen Yin first came to me, I was quite surprised. I wondered if he had the wrong person."

The story has to start with Shen Yin.

It was 2014, and the year went badly for him. For various reasons, he could no longer keep working with Wang Kai; he and Luo Zhenyu had each gone off to busy themselves with their own things; and what hit him hardest was his father's death.

"My father died while I was working on Guaijie. The idea was to round up people who were good at fitness, flower arranging, tea ceremony and magic, film videos of them, and also try to build a community. But my father's passing made me feel that the most essential thing in life was gone. I began to doubt the point of a cool lifestyle. All that mountain climbing and flower arranging, what the hell good was it at that moment in my life?" Shen Yin said.

The "cool lifestyle" Shen Yin refers to is Guaijie, the project he launched three months after leaving Luoji Siwei. After the split, Luoji Siwei was transformed and upgraded under Lao Luo (Luo Zhenyu), and its valuation soared, while Shen Yin took a sum of seed money from IDG and quickly put out a new show. He didn't say whether he was out to prove something, but in his situation at the time, wanting to prove something would have been perfectly reasonable.

He and his team brought in accomplished people from various fields and rented the 77 Theater on Meishuguan Houjie in Beijing, where they gave talks introducing audiences to cool ways of living. Shen Yin's thinking at the time was that once the talks grew and built up a fan base, they could combine e-commerce with the fan economy. That was how Guaijie would make money. If you could package one person, he reasoned, why not package a group of people? But reality soon punctured this idealistic plan. He found that very few people actually did anything after hearing a talk; even among those who had heard TED and Yixi talks, few really acted. By the time the Guaijie theater had run 20-odd episodes, he could no longer keep it going. Add his father's death, and Shen Yin came to doubt the offline theater format, and with it lost his judgment.

Yet the failure of Guaijie was not entirely negative. During those six months, Shen Yin sought out all kinds of people to talk with and began to take an interest in psychology. For all of this he had Guaijie's psychological counselor to thank. The man had no special skills. He simply talked about what he had learned and felt from talking with ordinary people, yet his videos were the most popular. That man was Li Songwei.

"I used to love fighting with myself. I always thought that as long as I worked hard, I could control everything. But once you reach a certain age, you find that many things are not the way you imagined. You have to accept your own imperfection, and I only learned that after talking with Li Songwei."

The first time Li Songwei met Shen Yin, he noticed what the man was like: "He was a bit anxious then, a bit compulsive, even somewhat depressed." Li Songwei's own manner was just the opposite: he speaks slowly, doesn't jiggle his leg, and is sometimes even impassive. He is the same on Since We're Here, with little expression and his voice held at a steady baseline.

Shen Yin later put the Guaijie theater on hold and started over. He persuaded Li Songwei to join the team, and together they created "Jingxiang," this experiment in the mental health of young urban people.

Psychological interview shows have in fact always had a steady audience. "Nothing is more satisfying than curling up in a warm bed in winter, with a funhouse mirror and red wine, watching strangers' melodramatic, tear-streaked lives," said the writer Jiang Lihan, who thought fairly well of Since We're Here after watching several episodes. "(The show) makes sure it is fun and has taste, and keeps its distance from the domestic squabbles on the lifestyle channels of various TV stations."

But many viewers also found Since We're Here too dull. "A young person tells a counselor about their troubles, and this question-and-answer runs a full 40 minutes. I couldn't make it to the end." We mentioned Laoniangjiu at the start. Frankly, for drama, Since We're Here comes nowhere near the neighborhood-committee aunties of Laoniangjiu. On that show the aunties mediate disputes with smooth worldly wisdom, and guests are often at daggers drawn or in tears. Since We're Here, by contrast, doesn't like making guests cry. The moment a guest's eyes well up, Li Songwei says "Let's pause," and waits for them to compose themselves before going on. This professionalism and rationality does the show no favors; it comes across as one-note and overly cautious.

Since We're Here airs one episode every Thursday, and its format has gradually matured into three segments: Portrait Day (the guest's own account), Talk Day (the conversation with Li Songwei) and Mirror Day (watching the video back). The team writes no script, sets no traps for guests, and doesn't interrupt them. The guests have a lot in common: all are urban young people aged 20 to 35 who are quick to understand. That is a standard Shen Yin set. He doesn't want the show to become a courtroom that serves up nothing but melodrama and cheap sympathy. The team also rejects scenes of tears of joy, sobbing in each other's arms, or sudden enlightenment. Shen Yin feels that "those things don't have a shred of interest."

The guest on the first episode was a young woman named Chloe. Her boyfriend kept asking to break up and then begging her to get back together, and she didn't know what to do. After filling out a paper questionnaire and recording preliminary footage, Chloe moved on to her conversation with Li Songwei. A few minutes in, Li Songwei sensed a weak side to her character and asked: "Your boyfriend is so brazen about it. Why don't you hack him to death?" Chloe was taken aback: "That's not something I would do!"

The episode aired on December 31, 2015, and quickly reached 200,000 plays on Tencent Video. But many who watched it found Li Songwei unreliable: his advice had no real substance and was too metaphorical. "I'm not actually telling her to take a knife to her boyfriend. I'm only offering her a possibility, to let her see a side that's missing from her character. How much of it she's willing to learn is not something our show, or even psychological counseling, can control."

Li Songwei has always felt that psychological counseling and a TV show are two different things. A show inevitably involves some entertainment, while counseling is highly professional. "Many people go to counseling as if looking for a master, a high monk. They want the master to give clear guidance: break up or not, divorce or not. In fact, counselors are not that godlike. What they provide is only a service, one that lets people look at a problem from more varied perspectives. People will find that life is much lighter and freer than they imagined."

He hasn't said how long he plans to work with Shen Yin.

Shen Yin now spends most of his time in his own office. His colleague Xueyang spent two and a half years at Guaijie, working in marketing and public relations. Xueyang says that before Jingxiang, Shen Yin spent most of his time out making the rounds, attending all kinds of new-media events and turning up to lend friends support. He was also busy writing books and planning shows for CCTV's Win in China and Dialogue. That frantic stretch is now over. Shen Yin says: "I think this change in me also has to do with what's going on inside me."

By June 2014, almost everyone knew that Shen Yin and Luo Zhenyu were splitting up. Luo Zhenyu posted a rather oblique message on Weibo: "When Zhang Weiping and Zhang Yimou were splitting up, I kept wondering why Zhang Yimou said nothing. Only now that time has passed do I see that a craftsman lets his craft do the talking. Everything else is nonsense. Director Zhang is awesome. Thoughts after watching the film Coming Home." Shen Yin was more direct on Weibo: "In just a year and a half, Luoji Siwei has 2 million WeChat users, and its videos have been viewed more than 100 million times. Because we each have our own ideas about future direction, Teacher Luo intends to run this project on his own, and we are still working through many matters one by one. I remain full of hope for the future of the content industry. I firmly believe the internet can help more interesting and substantive people stand out. As long as the original intention hasn't changed, every way of playing can be started over, and this ten-year internet experiment has only just begun."

This was a disagreement between Shen Yin, the operator, and Luo Zhenyu, the one being "operated." Before the split, Luo Zhenyu was the product core of Luoji Siwei, Wu Sheng was chief planner, and Shen Yin handled day-to-day operations in a role something like an agent's. The arrangement lasted only a year and a half before they diverged over how to grow: Luo Zhenyu was the core of the brand and the community, while Shen Yin wanted a decentralized community**.** If the business was going to keep revolving around Luo Zhenyu, Shen Yin naturally had no reason to stay.

Working with Li Songwei, Shen Yin is once again pushing someone else to the front of the stage, but he isn't worried that history will repeat itself: "Li Songwei has no intention of becoming an idol or a businessman. His personal ambition is to become a truly excellent psychological counselor." Li Songwei, for his part, feels that the division of labor between him and Shen Yin is very clear, and that he himself isn't that important. "In the whole project my role is very simple: I provide a professional pair of eyes. How those eyes are used and how the segments are set up is decided by Shen Yin and his team." During development, the production team tried a two-on-one format, with one counselor facing two guests at once. It didn't work as well as one-on-one, so they dropped it. Going forward, though, the show will try many new things, and may bring in new counselors to take turns in Li Songwei's role.

So it is hard to say what the show is really built around. It is not packaging a group of people: viewers surely don't tune in to watch how a counselor works. Nor will it drift toward gossip: with psychological counseling's premise of scientific, rational discussion, any melodrama would seem out of place. And the lone Zhihu star is not the point either: of those who come to the show because of Li Songwei's name, how much of their interest in him will carry over to psychology itself is doubtful.

Zhihu user "Xujiushi" said: "I don't know why, I just feel this show can't become a hit... No chicken-soup gimmicks, just earnestly making a show. As a viewer I can't see where it goes from here." Shen Yin's response: "I've never tried slowing down to do one thing, because my mind was never settled. Making 'Jingxiang' now is like setting up a mirror." He added: "First we create a space. As for this thing's fate, we'll see."

It sounds a lot like something he is telling himself. From start to finish, he has been questioning the meaning of everything in his past and present, and if he is going to keep doing something, he has to find some meaning in it.

Cover image source: Visual China Group