Born in 1968: "Growing Up Was a Process of Being Overturned, Bit by Bit" | Housing and Our Lives ⑤

Housing is the largest thing a person ever buys, and one of the witnesses to how a life changes. QDaily is running a series of reports that follow the thread of housing to see what happened in the years behind us.

It is time to sum up a stretch of history.

Most of our readers lived through only the tail end of it. Most of the story was written by the generation before us.

What we want to pass on is the part of it worth keeping: a firm belief in progress and development; a belief that society will keep opening better and larger space for the individual; that effort earns its due reward; that freedom can be fought for, and that we will get there in the end.

These are, in plain terms, universal values.

A word like "history" tends to disappear under grand narrative. We would rather use small, close-up interviews to do what sorting we can.

We begin this record with the subject people watch most closely in their own lives: housing.

Zheng Yiming is 49. He speaks slowly and without a trace of accent, perhaps because he grew up moving among four cities: Beijing, Xi'an, Guangzhou and Dongguan.

He is nostalgic for the years when China's economy grew fastest and, for a while, its intellectual climate was most open. He thinks such a time may never come again.

Born in 1968, Zheng Yiming was a rare only child for his generation. His parents were posted to different cities and lived apart, so he and his mother spent ten years in Beijing, in a single-story unit converted from a garage. His mother's younger sister lodged there too: three people in 10 square meters. "Chaotic" is the word he uses for it. He still remembers the big-character posters that covered Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and being marched through the streets by his teacher in first grade. Even as a small child, he never missed a political campaign.

Zheng Yiming's father taught at Xijundian — the Military Telecommunications Engineering Institute of the People's Liberation Army, forerunner of Xidian University — a military academy known across the country, and the alma mater of both Zheng Yiming and his mother. At 10 he followed his mother to Xi'an to join his father, and for the first time lived in a multi-story building: a four-room Russian-style apartment. The campus was full of Soviet-style teaching halls, tall, symmetrical, evenly proportioned. He studied there without a break, from the affiliated primary school through university. He grew up in a place that was closed off but never short of food or clothing, and that planted the seed of the life he would later choose.

At university he picked computing, the newest and hottest field of the day; he likes to call himself a "first-generation code farmer." After graduating he caught the wave that computerized China's banks in the 1990s and was assigned to a state-owned bank. Later, sick of life inside the system, he left to run his own businesses — a drifting stretch during which he bought two apartments in Guangdong. In 1981, Guangzhou and Shenzhen had become China's first pilot cities for commercial housing.

Zheng Yiming never liked facing the pressure of survival or the risk that comes with it, and in the end he decided to go back inside the system, back into finance. In his words: "I thought it over and figured I'd better lean on a big tree." That was his first compromise.

A job transfer brought him to Shanghai in 2006, and his career began to climb. Weighing the practical advantages, he joined the Communist Party at nearly 40, though he "had not the slightest interest in it" — he simply did not want to look "too out of step."

He then bought an 80-square-meter apartment on Tianshan Road, still his only property in Shanghai, because he has never obtained a Shanghai household registration (hukou). Having two sons was an automatic disqualification when he applied. He does hold a residence permit under the talent-introduction scheme, so both boys have been able to go to school in Shanghai; the older one sat the college entrance exam this year.

This is his eleventh year in Shanghai. He likes drinking whisky and smoking cigars with friends, and at those gatherings he is always the steadiest man in the room, surrounded by people who call him "big brother." Lately, though, he has been going through a midlife crisis.

What worries him most is his son. Although he himself grew up among equals, he sent the boy to one of the best middle schools in Shanghai and so built him an invisible social wall — a class identity. That same insurance has left his son innocent of the world.

The biggest difference between himself at 18 and his son now, Zheng Yiming thinks, is a sense of responsibility toward society and country. His university years, 1986 to 1990, were the last train of China's open era, as he puts it. He still remembers engineering students on campus working through books on philosophy and politics, arguing about Western democracy, thinking about where the country was going.

His son does not understand that feeling. Zheng Yiming calls today's generations born in the 1980s and 1990s "walking corpses."

By worldly measures he counts as one of the more successful people born in the 1960s. He is thinking about writing a memoir one day; perhaps this interview can serve as material for it.

We talked in a teahouse near Nanchang Road in Shanghai, not far from the former home of Fu Lei, who hanged himself in 1966. When it came up, Zheng Yiming said the price the previous generation paid for political campaigns and national upheaval was too cruel. This land still keeps that filthy soil, he said — he criticizes it and detests it, and he is also part of it.

What follows is Zheng Yiming's own account. This is one way to know him:

"Every big historical event that happened in Beijing, I was there for"

Both my parents' families were in Guangzhou then, and my grandparents were in Guangzhou too; my father grew up there. My mother didn't return to her parents until after Liberation. She lived and studied in Guangzhou, then tested into a school in Xi'an. After she finished college she was assigned to a military-industrial enterprise in Beijing, doing the books, while my father was still in Xi'an. They saw each other once or twice a year, on home-visit leave.

I was an only child, which was already unusual for that time. With my parents in different cities there was no way to look after more children, and by the time they were reunited I was 10 — too late to have another. My whole childhood I lived with my mother in Beijing, right up to 1978, just before I turned 10. Housing at military-industrial enterprises was terrible then. We lived in a single-story block converted from garages, one long strip after another, split down the middle by a wall — can you picture it? A garage is a rectangle; partition the middle, one car bay after another. That was it. Many of my parents' colleagues lived in the same compound, which was called a "work district," and the districts were even numbered — Work District 8, Work District 16. Each one had many rows of these houses.

It was like the row houses in American movies, except with no upper floor and no stairs. That's where my mother and I lived.

There was one room, a bit over 10 square meters, very small. Many people laid bricks and threw up a roof outside the door to make a kitchen for cooking. You ended up with a room attached to a room; a lot of Shanghai's one-room units still have that layout today.

There was no idea of a living room — two beds, a table, two stools, a wardrobe. I remember wooden crates and leather trunks stacked by the bed, the kind of trunks only that generation had; hardly anyone stores things in big trunks now. My mother's cousin also worked in Beijing and lived with us. Those dozen-odd square meters held three people: my mother, my aunt and me. My mother's younger brother had been sent down to the countryside, and when he came back to Beijing he sometimes stayed with us too, and then I'd sleep on top of the trunks.

There was running water but no toilet — you walked past two rows of houses to reach a public latrine. The work unit had a bathhouse, and we went once a week carrying a basin and a bath ticket. Beijing already had tall buildings by then. My uncle worked for the Ministry of Chemical Industry and lived in one of the old ministry blocks at Sanlihe in Muxidi, Russian-style architecture, still standing today. They had a proper multi-story building, which felt very high-class.

I have a lot of good memories of summer. We had no television, so in the evenings the neighbors carried out little folding stools, sat outside to cool off, played cards and talked nonsense. The uncle next door liked telling stories — Journey to the West, The Three Heroes and Five Gallants — and a crowd of us small kids would sit around him on our stools. On hot nights someone would haul a wire-mesh cot outside, and I can still see myself lying on it looking up. There really was a Milky Way back then, and it was beautiful.

Because it was work-unit housing, every neighbor's child was about my age. There was plenty of space between the buildings in that garage-converted block, and we shot marbles and threw beanbags. We played rough and homemade: anything could be a toy, anything could be a game. Cigarette packs were a game. Mosaic tiles from a building site were a game.

Only the moat separated this place from the Lama Temple — one bus stop to the temple, another to Hepingli. In Beijing's 1970s layout it no longer counted as the center, since the line of the moat was already the Second Ring Road. But next to Shijingshan or Tongzhou it was certainly the city proper: not as busy as Wangfujing or Chang'an Avenue, but absolutely inside the city.

Beijing felt empty and wide open then. Chang'an Avenue was very wide, with almost no cars — genuinely wide. The bus I took most was the No. 13. It started at Hepingli, one stop from our house — our stop was Beixiaojie Huokou — and ran to its terminus at Sanlitun, where my uncle lived. That bus crossed from Dongcheng all the way into Xicheng, past the Lama Temple and Kuanjie, one ride to the end of the line. We often went to my uncle's for dinner at weekends. Sometimes we went to the shops nearby; I remember riding on the back of a bicycle on weekends to Hepingli to buy yogurt and chocolate.

On April 5, 1976, I had dinner at my uncle's — he taught at Beijing University of Chemical Technology and lived at Muxidi — and afterward we walked to Chang'an Avenue, which was close. My three cousins and my mother came too. It was terrifying, the sheer scale of it: wreaths everywhere, crowds copying down poems and elegiac couplets. Everyone carried wreaths, and scrolls hung from them: "Wanting to grieve, I hear the ghosts howl; I weep while the jackals laugh." I rode on my cousin's shoulders to see over the crowd — nothing but a black mass of heads and wreaths. We left by 9 or 10 at the latest. Late that night they began clearing the square and making arrests.

The next day at home the radio started denouncing Deng Xiaoping as a counter-revolutionary, and there were worker picket squads. My homeroom teacher asked the class, "Who went to Tiananmen Square last night?" I assume it was a task handed down from above, a routine question, since we were tiny — only in first grade. I was naive enough to say, "I went!" The teacher said, "Sit down, sit down." And that was the end of it.

We went back to Guangzhou for Spring Festival every year, my mother from Beijing, my father from Xi'an. Couples living apart got a month of home-visit leave. The train from Beijing to Guangzhou took two days and two nights, a green-skin train, packed. To save money they didn't buy me a ticket; I sat on my mother's lap. A sleeper berth was unthinkable — a seat at all was lucky. The scene was a bit like the Indian trains you see now, though not as extreme, with people hanging off the sides. My mother's monthly salary was 39.5 yuan, and a ticket cost ten- or twenty-odd yuan. Expensive.

Beijing's supply of daily necessities was guaranteed, as I remember it — rather like Pyongyang today. The logic was: first, you had no money; second, even with money you couldn't buy anything. Buying meat in Beijing was no problem at the time. Before each trip south my mother would start shopping and curing bacon, and we'd haul a whole jar of cured meat back with us. Brown sugar, white sugar — everything took ration coupons. I remember dragging bags large and small onto the train to Guangzhou. Every year we went through it.

My mother's job wasn't busy then, quite relaxed — during the Cultural Revolution everything was chaotic, you have to understand. We marched all day, and slogans kept going up on the walls in different colors; you can still see walls covered in big characters out on the edge of town today. Back then it was "Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius," "Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Wind," "Down with Confucius the Second," and later "Smash the Gang of Four, Down with the Gang of Four," "Long Live Chairman Mao." I was small, but I certainly felt that atmosphere.

My mother's workplace was a state enterprise, everyone eating from one big pot, and on top of that the Cultural Revolution meant political campaigns all day. Who the hell was minding production, who was doing any real work? Everyone was just getting through the days. It took a long time after the Cultural Revolution ended before production started again and things got back on track. My father, at the university, was bored senseless too, with nothing to do. The political air was thick, and every big historical event that happened in Beijing, I was there for. In 1976 I had just started primary school, and I spent two and a half years at Hepingli No. 2 Primary School in Beijing. We little kids marched all day, around the compound, around the school; whatever the teachers organized, you went and marched. Today down with so-and-so, tomorrow down with so-and-so, the day after down with someone else.

Funeral music played constantly — that year it played over and over. Zhou Enlai died on January 8, and I spent that winter in Xi'an with my father. I was sleeping in his room when I heard the school loudspeakers, before dawn, playing funeral music and announcing his death. That memory has stayed vivid. Zhu De and Kang Sheng both died that year too, along with the Tangshan earthquake and the smashing of the Gang of Four. An extraordinarily crowded year.

"At Xijundian, we were all faculty children"

By then my parents felt that living apart forever wasn't a solution and wanted a transfer. My father's health couldn't take Beijing's sandstorms and dry air, and he taught at a university, so a move to Beijing wouldn't necessarily have come with a university post. So in 1978 my mother left Beijing and transferred to Xi'an; I was in second or third grade. My father's university had an affiliated primary school and middle school, so I grew up entirely inside that environment, and I went to that same university for my degree.

We lived in one big compound with all the faculty and staff. My childhood playmates and I have an extremely long history as classmates: in primary, middle and high school we were practically always in the same class, and then we went to the same university, if not the same department. That's the kind of friends we were.

The school broadcast over loudspeakers all day, keeping up plenty of military-academy habits. Reveille sounded at 5:45 in the morning. My father's life was strictly ordered: early every morning he'd pull me out of bed to wash and brush my teeth, make me drink a cup of lightly salted water, then take me out to run a thousand meters. Whatever good habits I've kept in life, he put them there.

My father at least had a multi-story building at the school. It was a university, after all, and its predecessor was a military academy of quite high rank, headed by a senior general or a major general; at the time it answered directly to Zhang Aiping. The building was Russian-style, and many of our main teaching halls were Soviet in style, with very high ceilings, heavy and solid-looking.

That apartment had been built as an old-fashioned suite for one family. The layout was odd: four rooms with doors facing each other, one bathroom, one kitchen, one sitting room for the whole suite. Three of my father's colleagues from his teaching and research office lived in that single unit, all close in age, with children close in age too. That's when I got to know the two friends I've had since childhood.

Because my father was living apart from his family, he was given a small dormitory room with a single bed, a desk and a cabinet, and a shared kitchen. Across the hall lived a family of four, a couple with two children.

After my mother and I came to Xi'an, we were assigned a bigger apartment, on the third floor of the next block. Later we moved again, to a place outside the campus, a two-bedroom unit much like Shanghai's two-room flats. You climbed the stairs to a long corridor with four households off it; you could see the whole thing from the balcony, where people usually put their stoves to cook. There was a kitchen inside as well, and I slept in my father's study.

By high school we'd moved to a bigger place with three rooms, and I finally had my own — though there still was no living room. Housing was all allocated as a welfare benefit then, and the school kept putting up new blocks.

I spent the whole of the 1980s in Xi'an. In Beijing I'd lived in a relatively closed little society, and in Xi'an too I grew up in one corner of the city, inside a closed world: stay in the compound and you had everything without going out. The intellectuals at the university were mostly from Jiangsu and Zhejiang; the people around me as I grew up were mostly from Shanghai, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong, with few Northerners and fewer locals.

The impression of the locals then was that they were coarse, uneducated, disorderly. When we got into fights in middle school, the big force in Xi'an was the Henan people. Xi'an had always been peaceful — even the Japanese never reached it — but after the great famine of 1942 a lot of Henan people fled there. The area north of the railway line was where they clustered: lumpenproletariat, cheating and swindling, brawling. They were poor and had no dignity to fall back on, so Henan people had a very bad name in Xi'an. Parents told their children, "When you grow up, don't you dare marry a Henan girl."

Street toughs trying to look hard would practice Henan dialect; throw out a few lines of it in a fight and people would think, whoa, this guy's from the Northeast. Fighting in standard Mandarin carried nowhere near the swagger of fighting in Shaanxi dialect; outside the university gates, anyone speaking Shaanxi dialect could fight a bit better than you, and anyone they met speaking Henan dialect could fight a bit better than them.

At university I tested into computer software — I'm a first-generation code farmer. The major was hot, demand was huge, the whole field new. The hot majors at our school were telecommunications, information technology and computer science, the best majors at any engineering school.

Computers were a novelty. I used an Apple II at a computing competition in high school. There was hardly any chance to get on a machine, and no household owned one, so the school had to select you first, and only then might you get somewhere to practice on a keyboard. I've seen a PDP-11, seen the tapes. Then microcomputers arrived, and by my third year there were 286s, very new at the time. We were all faculty children, so when somebody's father in a teaching and research office bought one it felt like the coolest thing in the world: get the key, sneak into the office at night to touch the machine, grab a floppy disk, play a game.

There were two games, one about catching thieves and digging for gold, one about shooting aliens, and later mahjong games from Taiwan. We'd already seen the earliest game consoles. In college, many students' parents went abroad for exchanges or study and brought consoles back — and we were hooked.

"After I quit, I went to work in Guangzhou"

My father was from Guangdong, and in the early 1990s, with Reform and Opening just picking up, Guangdong's economy was further along. As it happened, Dongguan University of Technology, back in my father's hometown, was hiring teachers. He wanted to return to his roots — he'd lived in the north all those years without ever much liking it — so he went back.

They moved to Dongguan in '92. I'd been working in Xi'an, but I applied for a transfer too, since I was their only child and wanted to be near them, and I was assigned to Dongguan, the same city.

There were already options by then. If you didn't want to stay inside the system, you could go to Shenzhen. Some of my classmates went to work there, some at state-owned firms. In the 1980s, with our computing degrees, we never had to worry about finding work. Plenty of Shenzhen's tech companies today are full of people from our school.

I went to a state-owned bank in Dongguan. It was a decent job, a comfortable spot. The computerization wave in banking needed enormous numbers of computer people, and the banks had no such talent in reserve at all, so every year batch after batch of graduates poured in. I spent four years there and quit in 1996. I didn't like it — in my twenties the work felt tedious and dead-ended, and I couldn't stomach some of the uglier things inside the system. When you're young you can afford that stance. I also spent every yuan I earned; I'd always lived with my parents, so I never faced any pressure to make ends meet. When I quit I was earning three or four thousand yuan a month and had saved none of it.

After I quit, I went to work in Guangzhou. Had I not left my old work unit, I'd have been in line for an allocated apartment. I was the right age for it, but I never got the benefit. Allocation always went by seniority: years of service, position, age, marital status. I remember the last round before I left; I was in the group that missed out. I wasn't married yet, while a colleague in my office who married that year got an apartment, two bedrooms and a living room. That commercial flat in Dongguan could have sold for 100,000 to 200,000 yuan in '93 or '94. I never got my hands on it. I left and stopped working there.

I got a place of my own sometime after the start of the 1990s, when I was pushing 30. I figured I could live in it while I worked, so I bought my first apartment next to Guangzhou's Baiyun Airport, with some help from my family. It cost 300,000 yuan, a 120,000-yuan down payment and mortgage payments of a little over 1,000 yuan a month.

Prices in Shanghai and Dongguan weren't far apart then — really not far. When I bought in Guangzhou in 1996 I caught a relative high in that market, 5,000 yuan per square meter. In '97 or '98, Hongmei Road in Shanghai was 3,000. Guangzhou was ahead, because Guangzhou and Shenzhen sit close to Hong Kong and commercialization moved fast. Plenty of people my age around me were buying. One friend bought in Shenzhen back in 1992, before he'd even graduated; that year Shenzhen really was a speculator's paradise, because there were stocks too, every kind of speculation — anything could be flipped.

Later, when I started my own business and needed an office, I bought a second property in Dongguan in '98. A down payment of a few tens of thousands did it, the price wasn't high, and installment terms were extremely flexible then. It wasn't big, just over 80 square meters, and day to day I still lived with my parents. In 2004 my second child was born and I felt I needed more room, so I bought a duplex of more than 200 square meters in central Dongguan. The whole family moved in, three generations. It was a large commercial development, two units per floor per elevator, cars and pedestrians separated inside the compound, with a swimming pool and a clubhouse.

I've done every kind of business, computers and trade both. A friend and I registered a company; I sold computers and I sold software, software we wrote ourselves, bent over our desks. The Lijiang Pearl Grand Hotel, still standing, the building that looks like the White House, hotel and entertainment and dining in one — we built their whole management system, the checkout, the karaoke song-selection system. That job was worth more than 600,000 yuan at the time, and our company had four or five people. I partnered with a college classmate, brought in one of his middle-school classmates and one more man who did hardware. We had contacts in abundance, so we worked like a general contractor, doing a bit of everything and handing the parts we couldn't do to classmates we knew.

I also sold consumer goods, ran a retail counter, did all sorts. I had the contacts, so whatever looked profitable, I'd do a little business in it. Thinking it over later, we really weren't successful, because there was no clear main line: half playing, half working, making small money. We weren't doing pure upstream work; we were doing one downstream project after another, hotel management systems and the like. Our way of operating ran purely on relationships — Dongguan was opening a lot of entertainment venues and hotels, I knew a lot of people, friends made introductions and we did the work.

Then we noticed that in IT hubs like Guangzhou and Shenzhen the competition had become highly systematic; that's when the real IT companies grew up there. Their prices were very low and their margins thin. We wouldn't touch a job under a 40-50% margin; they'd take one at 20%, because they wanted volume. We also hit trouble on integrated jobs — they had it down to a formula, and we could see the gap. My advantage was being local: I'd made a lot of friends during my bank years, though that wasn't really the same market. On an order from the Finance Bureau I'd sell one computer for 25,000 yuan when my cost was 7,000. Once that kind of information gap closed, it stopped being a direction worth pursuing.

"Someone told me, 'It'd be best to join the Party in this position'"

After that I went back to being half inside the system, back into finance. That's my character — I don't want to carry the pressure of survival, because under that pressure you can't concentrate on your work. In the end I figured I'd better lean on a big tree.

I went to Dongguan in 1992; my father died in 2006. That same year a job came up in Shanghai, so I came. Four cities, in the end.

Living conditions in Dongguan were far better than in Shanghai. Our compound there was cheap, 600,000 yuan, 3,000 yuan per square meter, and it already had a big outdoor pool with a curve to it, plus an indoor heated one. Very few compounds in Guangdong lack a swimming pool.

I lived well in Dongguan, feasting and drinking every day. My abilities more than covered the job, I'd already done well for myself, bought a big apartment, had a car, managed a few dozen people. I was somebody locally, and the people I mixed with were the local upper middle.

When I first came to Shanghai I couldn't adjust at all. A colleague suggested we rent a place together, and I asked, "Does it have a clubhouse, a pool?" He said, "Good luck finding that."

My expectations for housing came down bit by bit.

I lived in company housing in Shanghai then, a commercial flat the company rented for me; I was a senior executive by that point, so it was a fairly large three-bedroom with two reception rooms. We had come to put out a fire: many people had quit to start their own businesses and the company had been drained of talent. A lot of key staff arrived afterward as reinforcements, and at first we rented two units in the same compound, one with four bedrooms, one with three. One by one, as people finished their assignments, they pulled out, until I was the last one left holding down the three-bedroom. Two years there in all.

After that I rented for a year on Guyang Road, then immediately after on Jiaotong Road, near the train station.

Around then my job required me to join the Party, so I started studying Party history. The position really had reached the point where I needed to move up into the Party. "It'd be best to join the Party in this position" — that's what someone told me, putting it to me in purely worldly terms. I had not the slightest interest at the time, but I thought, fine, join. It had practical value, and it saved me from looking odd. I didn't want to stand out too much.

Once I'd joined I went ahead and read some books on Party history, and the more I read the more entertaining it got. As children we were taught all this: peasants "recalling past bitterness to savor present sweetness," never enough to eat, and we were determined to rescue the toiling masses suffering in the depths of American imperialism. It's just like North Korea's education bureau today, insisting that only their own people are happy. There's a book called Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. So the process of growing up, for us, was a process of being overturned, bit by bit.

Not until 2009 did I settle on staying in Shanghai for good, and I bought an apartment on Tianshan Road. Inside the system you can't just go back whenever you feel like it, and it looked like I'd be here a long time. The children were getting older and needed schooling, and it wasn't good for two boys to be away from me for long stretches, so we decided to move the whole family to Shanghai.

My hukou isn't in Shanghai, so I can only buy one apartment. I don't have it because I fail one key criterion: family planning was a basic national policy, and I have two sons. If all the prior documentation wasn't in place when my second son was born, the city won't grant it — an automatic veto. Violating the family-planning policy is an automatic veto.

I haven't found the energy to try again, because what I care about now is my older son sitting the college entrance exam, which isn't affected. Since it doesn't affect him, since he can study and sit the exam in Shanghai, having the hukou or not no longer matters much to me.

Neither son has a Shanghai hukou, but it doesn't affect their schooling, because my residence permit came through talent introduction. That category no longer exists, though. It's a points system now.

To be closer to our son's school, our family rented a friend's apartment in Minhang and rented out the Tianshan Road place, using the rent we collect to pay the rent here, with money left over. That's the arrangement we live under. Most of the tenants on Tianshan Road are foreigners, Japanese and Singaporean. It's a good area, south of Suzhou Creek, right by Metro Line 2, very convenient. Some foreign companies give staff a housing subsidy, and those employees go out and rent places like that.

"Deep down I've always found this kind of speculation disgusting"

When I first came to Shanghai in 2006 I'd wander over to sales offices in my spare time just to look, and ask, "What's the price now?" "Seventeen thousand — three million for an apartment." I thought, damn, that's insane, that's expensive, because in Guangdong it was still a few thousand a square meter.

I bought on Tianshan Road in 2008, because it was close to work. Tianshan was already at 20,000 yuan per square meter, and since I bought at 20,000 it has never gone below that. Honestly, I didn't much like Shanghai then; I loved life in Guangdong and had no plan to stay long. Buying was a wait-and-see move: I could live in it myself or treat it as a small investment. That's why I didn't go for a bigger unit.

If I'd been a truly stubborn or truly sharp-eyed speculator, I had the means when I arrived in Shanghai — or could have stretched on tiptoe — to get into flipping apartments.

Nearly everyone who made money early did it that way: with 20% down you could run five times leverage and do anything you liked. Deep down I've always found this kind of speculation disgusting, and I especially dislike the agents. By the time I reached Shanghai it was basically a seller's market. I knew that was reality, but I found it repellent, because people in property, frankly, look down on you underneath it all, and when one of them got cocky in front of me I couldn't stand it. It made me angry, so I'd walk away.

There were no purchase restrictions then; I could actually have bought two adjacent apartments. I could have covered both down payments and both monthly mortgages, but after paying two mortgages my salary might have left me 2,000 yuan in hand. I could certainly have survived on that, but 2,000 yuan meant no drinking and no cigars, and I didn't want to live that way.

My pursuit of money was never that fierce, and I was getting by, so why twist my life into that shape? I've always handled these things within a range I can bear. I've never staked everything and charged ahead regardless, choosing an outcome I might not be able to take. I'm not the type to throw myself at it like a man betting big on dice and waiting for the cup to lift. If I had done it then, taken two apartments, looking back now I'd have made a killing. But if my job had wobbled under that financial strain, I'd have been in a sorry state, a very sorry state. So I don't regret it, because that was the only decision available to me at the time, and I think it was a rational one.

When I bought, I thought prices would probably keep rising, but using house prices to keep blowing up this balloon and hold the economy together will bring an enormous crisis later. Picture it: if a systemic risk blows, there's no way to absorb it domestically, absolutely no way, because it has already roped in the banks and roped in ordinary people.

When it collapses, think of Hong Kong's negative-equity flats. You buy an apartment, and not only is the apartment gone, out of nowhere you've acquired a debt. That's a vivid, real example. In 1997 we were in Guangdong, and we had so much exchange with Hong Kong. In that crisis, how many people there were beaten down into poverty, how many jumped off buildings.

Everyone takes part, and someone inevitably pays the bill. What worries us is how much of it our children will have to carry. Historically there have been bloody handovers of power, the emperor changing surname, and with it nationwide upheaval, chaos, death, bloodshed, a redistribution of wealth. Very bloody. It might not be that bloody now, but you'll go through something like a depression after fast growth — Japan today, for instance.

Seen from above, the big problem is that this country's development is extremely unbalanced, resources are allocated unevenly, and property is only a reflection of how the economy grew. In a country this vast there are only a handful of places people want to go. What do you think that means? At the very least it means the competition to survive in those places will get more brutal.

Americans move many times in a lifetime, because way up north there's Seattle with its high tech — Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing; Texas has defense and rockets; the West Coast has Silicon Valley and the Hollywood film industry; the East Coast has finance; Miami has tourism, resorts, Disney. That tells you they have many places to make a living, very balanced, or at least not so lopsided. China? These days if you have any ambition, any real ability, do you have a choice beyond Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen? You don't.

"Midlife crisis"

I think the midlife crisis has been pushed back. The worst of it certainly doesn't come at 40 — not for me, anyway. It comes closer to 50. It arrives from every direction, every kind of anxiety. Your career has hit its ceiling, your children have grown, and there's more to worry about: where they'll go, their education, the shaping of their character. All of it has to be thought about.

My son sat the college entrance exam this year, and when the summer break ends he'll start university, here in Shanghai. He's what I'm most anxious about. Pull back further, and what I'm most anxious about is the whole of society. Chinese society is unhealthy, and in that kind of unhealthy environment his growth and his future are genuinely worrying.

Say I think a piece of land is badly polluted. Then I can't grow vegetables on it — or if I did, I'd be a crooked trader selling them to other people, since I couldn't eat them myself, right? You see the logic. In bad soil you can't expect quality produce.

In this environment, how does a child whose values I consider sound adapt? What he's likely to meet is pain. Take unfairness — systemic unfairness, where once your business grows large enough you have to attach yourself to some power broker. Attaching yourself to power brokers becomes a requirement. Look at the so-called "nation's husband": he's flaunted his crooked values in public for years and been adored for it, and his family may still come to grief in the end. So what does that tell the people competing against him?

Wherever there's human society there's a certain amount of unfairness, but in the West there may at least be a full right to choose for yourself, while here there aren't many choices. Right now, for instance, I'm anxious about what my son will study. Ideally it would follow his own interest, but my child has been looked after so much by the family that he has no strong views of his own. So I have to help him choose. And from what standpoint am I supposed to choose?

Setting interest aside, I'd look for a field I think has a future, or that at least won't leave him worrying about a living, and have him study that. Whether he'll get through it is itself something I worry about. And once he does — when I think of the infuriating things I run into every day inside the system at work — will he run into the same things? Will he be able to look at them straight? Isn't all of that worth being anxious about?

A good friend of mine used to run a shipyard, and he sent his son abroad for an American education starting in middle school. A very independent boy. Every year he came home he booked his own economy ticket. We have a friend at China Eastern Airlines who, thinking about how long that international flight is, said, give me your son's details and if first class isn't full I'll bump him up for free. His father passed it on, but once he was on the plane the boy never went looking for the man, because he had nothing but contempt for that kind of favor.

I think that's admirable. He didn't waste his time abroad. Us, though? "You'd be a fool not to take a perk like that," right? Why shouldn't I take that money — if I don't, some other bastard will. That's the Chinese mentality now, honestly. We're inside it and we know how dirty it is. So tell me, once you have children, doesn't that make you anxious — how do you raise him, by what rules of survival do you teach him to live?

Deep down I despise this kind of thing, but if he wants to get on, he'll have to hold values different from mine. I know that too well. So I'd have to teach him to cut corners, jump the queue, flatter people — valuable for survival, but it would sit very badly with me to raise my son that way.

Me at 18 and my son at 18 are nothing alike. At the very least the share of us who got into a key university was low, and we carried a kind of pride and sense of mission. His generation doesn't have it. They're nihilistic, like walking corpses.

I asked my son what he wants to do, and he said he doesn't want to do anything, he just wants to play games. I told him, "Playing games — that's a loser's choice, goddammit." He couldn't understand what I meant. I said, do you know that while you sit here playing games, you and some shamate kid on the edge of a third-tier city — those kids with the spiked, dyed hair — are doing exactly the same thing? Living in this city, in a family like this, what's the difference between you and him? He didn't answer. He couldn't get his head around it.

Games, to me, are spiritual opium. How is that different from taking drugs? How is it different from joining a pyramid scheme or a cult?

He has no grasp of the world or of society; he doesn't even know what a class is yet. He thinks what he has now is the natural order, obtained without cost, when all of it came from me, and his peers are all the same — none of his middle-school classmates in Shanghai comes from a family that's badly off.

Not like us as children, when everyone our age was in the same class. The best thing about our time was that "anything was possible," because the privileged class was, after all, a very small circle. I saw little of the dark side, and the world I grew up in was relatively clean. At school what people competed over was whether you did well in your studies; at least we never compared whose family had more money. As children we looked down on money and valued loyalty: if I had 10 yuan in my pocket, the three of us would spend it together. That's how we grew up.

It's completely different now. Children's class positions are fixed from an early age, their circles have already hardened — children from one kind of family play with children from that same kind of family, rich kids play with rich kids. Some grow restless and stretch on tiptoe for things beyond their reach, and I've watched plenty of people fall flat doing it. Really, plenty. So tell me, isn't that worth being anxious about?

I think this anxiety has to do with how I grew up, with the education I got as a child. I always feel that whatever you do has to mean something. But my son asks, why does life have to have meaning? I told him: the beginning of your life isn't yours to decide and neither is the end; what matters is the middle, the process, and you have to make it interesting, vivid, a bit of fun. At the very least, I think, don't live like a walking corpse; at the very least be clear about it. Once you understand, you may feel a person is tiny and can do nothing about most things, but that's still better than going through life a fool. If something ever happens to you, you should at least know what it is.

On the whole, honestly, I don't have much confidence in this country. Society right now is extremely unhealthy, and at this stage we can't see a bright future. The clever ones, the elites, have all gone abroad; batch after batch, the best are skimmed off and taken away. What's left in this place? That's the real anxiety.

"As long as you're on this land, no one escapes"

Our generation caught the last train of intellectual openness. We were the cohort brainwashed from childhood, but we also caught good years, the most open years of thought. There weren't many taboos then — we'd talk about anything, say anything.

We had a feeling for family and country and a sense of social responsibility. We thought of ourselves as the pillars of the future, took building a better country as our own duty, worried about the nation and its people. We'd rack our brains over it, think about what we wanted the country to do, think about the political system.

Why? From the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, the first to be attacked were certain social elites — landlords, rich peasants, capitalists, intellectuals — and that lasted until 1966. From 1966 to 1976 the whole population was attacked, suppressed, living in fear. After 1976, the decade from 1978 to 1989 was a sudden release after intense pressure, and after that release there was a great deal of space. Look at us going to school then: whether or not you truly understood it, everyone at least leafed through books on philosophy, politics and history.

I remember buying a great stack of them — Schopenhauer, Sartre, Nietzsche. I didn't necessarily understand them; I'd leaf through and fall asleep. But it was an atmosphere, you know? One shared memory from that time is that we all watched a television series called River Elegy, very famous, a fairly deep reflection on our people and our country. Our Chinese servility — it's the same two-tier society we have now, a master above and slaves below, and if you truly can't manage being a slave any longer, then you go be the master, because those are the only two positions.

At university our politics teacher would stand in the big tiered lecture hall — every university had its politics textbook, you know — and say, "Whoever's near the back door, lock it," and he'd close the front door himself and say, "Today we're not talking about that," and then lecture on Western democracy. The atmosphere in universities was especially open then, and ours was a science and engineering school at that, nothing but technical guys.

Honestly, how mature could our thinking have been? Impossible, since we'd never had systematic education or training in it. We just had a heart that cared where the country was going. You can't find that at all among people born in the 1980s and 1990s. Where did that concern come from? We were educated by the Party from childhood and never missed a political campaign. From the moment I enrolled in first grade and belonged to some organization, we marched: we marched to counter the right-deviationist revival, we marched to bring down the Gang of Four. We were fully involved in every affair of state.

My grandfather's generation paid too cruel a price for this, far too cruel. Read the real history of the Republic and think it through carefully and it's genuinely shocking. Under Old Mao, after 1949, some figures put unnatural deaths at 60 million. Imagine how terrifying that is. Land reform alone — "fight the local tyrants, divide the land" — killed 2 million people. Two million could be the whole population of a small country. How terrifying is that. They were the elite, intelligent, educated people who'd built up their property through hard work and hardship, and in the end drifters robbed them of it "legally." Deeply evil.

The whole country was like that, everyone crazed. Anyone with a little sense — the share of people with our sort of knowledge was probably far too small back then — but imagine it: all around you a pack of people like mad dogs, worked up as though shot full of stimulants, telling you "this is what you are, this is what you are." Imagine the fear those intellectuals must have lived in to kill themselves. Lao She, so optimistic, so witty; or Fu Lei, who lived just up the street from here — what fear and despair drives people to that? It's hard even to imagine, and no one has ever settled the account.

The steering of values has changed. You don't need to say anything: you may not make political demands, you may not make religious demands. As the technical tools have advanced, the control has grown stricter and more effective. So where does human energy get vented? Why do we call a society decadent — why, for instance, did ancient Rome fall into decadence in the end? Because there was no spiritual pillar. That's why in the West religion exists to hold society together and keep it stable. A secular government runs daily affairs while something fills the spiritual side.

In China the spiritual side is unfilled, so everyone goes looking for organizations. A chat group, a hobby, anything can become one. It isn't this severe abroad; there, only the true fanatics hang around in a scene — only when you love something to a certain degree does a circle form. Not here. Here we go looking for a circle the moment we set foot over the threshold.

So now you see all kinds of gatherings, all kinds of people crowding together, and everyone fairly empty inside. Look at how primary-school classmates keep holding reunions; we insist on finding something to hold us together, even though our social classes and our views of the world may have diverged completely. But we still have to gather. As long as somebody digs up a small spark of excitement, that's enough — which is really a sign of a deeply rotten society.

Some people my age avoid all this entirely. They don't think about it, don't consider it, they just live their lives. I have a former dorm-mate who's a mainstay at a foreign company, and another classmate who's a project manager at a tech company; they've never cared about any of it. There's great danger in that. We've had eras like this before, eras of gilded dissipation when nobody thought about anything, and in the end they only met a bigger disaster. There was no dodging it.

History keeps going round, each cycle two or three hundred years, and you should know that our cycles have always been bloody, paid for with the deaths of a quarter of the population or more. As long as you're still on this land, no one escapes.

Illustration: Lin Yuyao

At the interview subject's request, "Zheng Yiming" is a pseudonym.

Cover image: pinterest, wikimedia, upslash