One Story Made This Man — and Gave Him the Chance to Leave the Business | "Ten Years" ⑤

"You know, once I had this, the steps I could climb for the rest of my life were different."

Lin Tianhong has always been pleased with himself. Apart from that, the words he says most often are "no meaning."

There was meaning once. In 2008, Lin Tianhong was 29 and a lead reporter at China Youth Daily's Freezing Point Weekly. The feature he wrote, Going Home (《回家》), won him the paper's best story of the year and the feature-writing prize at Southern Weekly's annual Media Salute. The fee for Going Home in 2008 was 3,000 yuan, but what it did for him ran far past anything money can measure — ten years later, it is still the label that identifies him.

What he remembers still hits hard.

On the evening of May 12, 2008, Lin Tianhong was at home writing. At eight he turned on the television: the death toll from the Wenchuan earthquake had reached 8,000. He immediately asked his editor, Du Yongtao, to send him to the disaster zone, and learned that Freezing Point, as a central-level outlet under China Youth Daily, had received the Central Publicity Department's instruction the moment it went out — "Don't move."

Lin Tianhong gritted his teeth and finished his story. At three in the morning he turned the television on again; the death toll was still climbing when he fell asleep at five. He normally silenced his phone before bed, but that night he was too exhausted to remember.

At nine in the morning the phone woke him. He was about to complain when Du Yongtao's name came up on the screen — and by the time he picked up, the call had ended. He dialed straight back. The voice on the other end said: "Get to the paper now. You leave this afternoon. If you hadn't called back, two seconds later I'd have dialed another reporter."

Lin Tianhong shot up off the couch, shoved his laptop into his bag, pulled on his shoes and ran out the door. He forgot to pack a change of clothes.

Only later did he learn that sixty or seventy reporters at the paper had signed up for the disaster zone that day, and the paper picked two. "They went back and forth over the writers and settled on me," Lin Tianhong says.

The other was He Yanguang, a 57-year-old photographer who had won China's top journalism prize seven times. He had worked at China Youth Daily for almost as many years as Lin Tianhong had been alive.

"I felt great about it. A chance like that was hard to come by... I wasn't frightened at all. For a 29-year-old it was: fuck, something's finally happened."

On May 13, through military connections, China Youth Daily grabbed one ticket on a flight leaving Beijing for Chengdu at five that afternoon — the first flight after service resumed. The plane was almost entirely relief teams: doctors, technicians from China Mobile and China Unicom. Lin Tianhong also saw plenty of familiar faces, mostly from national outlets like Caijing and Legal Daily. They understood each other without a word and did not say hello.

The plane circled over Chengdu for more than an hour before it landed, at nine at night. Lin Tianhong and He Yanguang stayed at an armed-police guesthouse on Jiangxi Street. Chengdu itself was almost untouched, but the mood there was enough to put him on edge: no pedestrians, military trucks and ambulances running through empty streets, sirens tearing across the city. That night he barely slept.

Before they set out at nine the next morning, He Yanguang told him: "Find a slip of paper. Write your name, your work phone number and your emergency contact on it, put it in your pocket, and keep it on you."

By the time they reached Dujiangyan, "it was basically a paralyzed city already," Lin Tianhong recalls. In the earthquake, 3,069 people died in Dujiangyan. His first stop was the Dujiangyan Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital, where the inpatient building had collapsed completely and more than 200 patients and staff lay under the rubble.

Lin Tianhong noticed an old man walking back and forth over the debris. The armed police officer next to him said the old man's daughter was a nurse at the hospital. He had arrived earlier than anyone and had been helping the police clear bodies.

A crane was lifting a huge roof beam. Under it, in the rubble, a pink nurse's uniform slowly came into view, head and limbs still buried in dirt. The police worked the head free. The old man stepped up, looked once, showed nothing on his face, then turned and walked away.

Lin Tianhong went after him and asked whether he had found his daughter. The old man answered: "Yes. I saw the mole on her nose."

The hospital was more than fifty kilometers from home, and the couple did not often get to see their daughter. Not long before, she had called her mother to say she had a Mother's Day present ready — a secret for now; she would bring it home the following week. Her mother said, "Things cost money, don't spend it foolishly," and hung up in a hurry.

At that point, Lin Tianhong remembers, "the old man suddenly broke down and said: 'We'll never know what she bought for us.'"

Diagonally across from the hospital was Dujiangyan Xinjian Primary School, where more than 300 pupils died. As Lin Tianhong remembers it, a quarter of the classroom building was left standing. A pickup truck sat in the middle of the playground, its bed piled high with children's bodies.

A woman's wail tore out of the rubble. Four armed police pulled her out, and a child's body was set down in the middle of the open ground.

Lin Tianhong saw a man of about 40 photographing the child on the ground, frame after frame. From bystanders he learned this was the father, the head of a construction crew in Dujiangyan who owned the town's only civilian crane. After the earthquake he had driven it straight to the school, and in the past 24 hours he had helped dig out a good many bodies.

Disinfection workers sprayed the child down, and a doctor was about to zip the body into a green bag. The father took it from him and said, "Let me." He lowered the child in slowly. "He was extremely, extremely calm there. I didn't hear a sound," Lin Tianhong recalls.

Then the father carried the green bag slowly across the playground toward the pickup, the students' temporary grave, everyone watching. "When he got to the truck, he threw his head back and howled. Half a minute, a very, very long time. Like a wolf."

A few days in the disaster zone and Lin Tianhong found grief in every direction, bodies and broken walls wherever he turned. He decided to stop filing the paper the same death dispatches over and over. "What did a news dispatch mean in a time like that?"

He started looking for a whole story.

At a junction in the town of Yingxiu, Lin Tianhong met Cheng Linxiang and his wife, carrying their son's body home. As he remembers it, the son, Cheng Lei, a high-school student, was two centimeters taller than his father; slung across his father's back, his feet dragged along the ground. Cheng Linxiang had to keep stopping to hoist his son, who had stopped breathing, back into place.

Lin Tianhong wrote in the story: "Cheng Linxiang looped his son's hands around his neck and laid them gently against his chest. As he walked, he talked to his son: 'Son, Daddy's taking you home. Hold on tight, don't wriggle...' Along the way Cheng Linxiang kept slipping, and Cheng Lei's body fell to the ground. He apologized to his son and lifted him back up."

That story was Going Home.

"I became famous."

"Everything I have to stand on comes from that one story, and its reach has lasted right up to today."

After he came back from the disaster zone, Lin Tianhong wrote: "In my limited life of nearly thirty years, I had built up some understanding of life, some reverence for death... I suddenly realized they had collapsed, like the pulverized ruins in front of me."

He lost interest in other assignments. Most everyday news struck him as beside the point — though he did write one more piece, The People Will Vote With Their Feet (《人民会用脚投票》), which won another Southern Weekly annual salute.

At that point he decided it "must be as far as this goes," and that he "should go out and have a look."

In June 2011 Lin Tianhong left Freezing Point Weekly. He went on to be assistant editor-in-chief of China Weekly and deputy editor-in-chief of Renwu (《人物》) magazine.

Like many of his peers, in 2014 he moved into another world — companies. What he talked about most then was "financial freedom"; plenty of colleagues had reached it ahead of him. He went to Wanda to run its in-house magazine, then jumped to Alibaba Pictures.

His old résumé was not forgotten, but it was now being looked at from an entirely different angle. "Later, at Alibaba, the Lei Yang case came up — the man they said was beaten to death by police in Huilongguan, Changping, over soliciting a prostitute. Then you listen to what the kids born in the 1990s in our department are saying to each other, and you feel everything you did in media was a fucking waste," Lin Tianhong said.

"Listening to those Alibaba kids talk about the Lei Yang case, I thought: what the hell was all that we used to say about 'enlightenment' and 'civic consciousness'? These kids went to university too, and they still have no idea. And you have to understand that people like this are the overwhelming majority in China. So what's the meaning? My precious, limited life went into meaningless things."

"Because there is no meaning, there is no desire."

Lin Tianhong learned a new way of surviving: shut every channel of communication, delete Weibo, keep his head down.

What Lin Tianhong does now is still the feature-story trade he was in ten years ago, with one step added — turning the stories he digs up into films and TV series. Last March he became editor-in-chief of ONE and chief content officer of Youshu Culture. Han Han is his boss.

Lin Tianhong does not deny that he is a refined egoist and a pragmatist. His yardstick is "whether doing a thing produces an effect in the shortest possible time."

Being a reporter was useless; turning stories into films and TV is far more useful. "I think the film and TV market now needs things that show what ordinary people's lives are actually like. To put it grandly — something that can do more to shape social attitudes, or how people understand the world, than Eternal Love did."

In April we met Lin Tianhong at ONE's office on Fuquan North Road in Shanghai. He hesitated a long time before agreeing to the interview. Through it he recalled his ten years in detail; the moment it ended, he turned careful again.

"There's a safety calculation in my keeping quiet these days. First, I have to think of the company; second, I have to think of my family," he said.

"We came out of Dujiangyan and reached the Zipingpu Dam around one or two in the afternoon. Everyone queued for the rubber boats to Yingxiu, went ashore at the Wenchuan aluminum plant, then walked two or three hours of mountain track — it didn't even count as a road. On that road we ran into Cheng Linxiang, and that's where Going Home came from.

I thought it was a good story. Seeing them felt different — parents carrying their son's body home. A journey of three people like that is the plainest and the purest kind of feeling, and it was bound to move people. It's what we're always looking for.

I stayed two nights in Yingxiu, then went back to Chengdu to recover, planning to return to the town of Shuimo afterward to find the father and the son. But I had to go with He Yanguang, and he had driven off to Mianyang, so I looked for stories in hospitals around Chengdu — and they were genuinely hard to find.

I'm sure there were many good stories we never found, but one reporter searching a sea of people has a very hard time. Besides, everyone was chasing the hot names then, and I found myself doing the same — except you had no chance of an interview at all. You might meet the person and exchange a few words, but countless outlets were waiting for them to speak. CCTV cranked out plenty of the Lin Hao type. Whereas a book like Zhang Liang's 168 Hours of the Wenchuan Earthquake (《汶川地震 168 小时》) might get a mention on CCTV, and nobody would dig into what was behind it. Ten years on, looking back, what Zhang Liang did had value; purely as writing, that book is worth a great deal.

Later He Yanguang came back and we interviewed the Chengs together. The two of us cried so hard during it we could barely breathe.

Cheng Lei's grandmother spent those days in regret. On the day he left home, Cheng Lei had gone to pick cherries from the family's tree, and she, afraid he would slip, scolded him hard. 'My good grandson,' the old woman cried out, 'come back — Grandma will let you pick as many as you want!'"

"The day after we got back I started writing at two in the afternoon and finished by seven — five hours. Nothing to eat or drink all day, two packs of cigarettes, and the story was done. That story really was written as if a spirit had taken hold of me — that child's spirit. I'll tell you honestly, I don't know myself how it got written.

Then I began doubting it. With so much being reported, who would care about one ordinary story like this? I sent it to a colleague at Freezing Point. After she read it she said, 'I couldn't get through it. I couldn't stop crying.'

That gave me a little confidence, so I sent it to my boss. I went to bed very early afterward and slept like the dead. The next morning I saw his reply: 'Tianhong, I want to thank you. No grief, however vast, matches one concrete grief.'

He was the one who had hired me, and he knew my temperament exactly. They say a loud drum needs a heavy stick; I'm the kind that sounds without being struck. So he was the kind of boss who took pleasure in holding me down. He liked me, I knew that, but that was his way of handling me. It was the first time he had ever spoken to me straight. When I read the message, the tears came. I was raw in those days; anything set me off.

After the story ran, it went up on Sina's front page a little after nine in the morning, and my phone never stopped. People I knew and people I didn't, all kinds, called me. Back then I used a Nokia brick with a battery that lasted; that day I burned through two of them. That had never happened.

Strangers said they wanted to donate. They called and asked through tears: 'Is this Reporter Lin? I'm a reader from Jiangsu, and I'm a father too' — and then they'd start sobbing. Several calls like that, people howling.

Our editor-in-chief texted me too: 'I counted this morning — I've had messages from 19 propaganda chiefs around the country, all saying your story was good.'

That's when you know what a story can reach.

Nothing I'd written before compared, because any story with that kind of force is the product of the right moment, the right ground and the right people. 'The right moment' means a huge historical event that countless people care about. 'The right ground' means you're there. 'The right people' means your story comes out decent. Miss one and it doesn't work.

That story made me famous overnight. In the newsroom and in the industry I became someone everybody knew — knew as a writer.

I became famous.

From a reporter's point of view, everyone doing features back then had one wish: to win Southern Weekly's annual salute someday. In that era it was the industry's benchmark, its recognition of you. Freezing Point had won it a few times, and I used to think that if I won it once my career would be complete. It was something you could want and not reach.

And then all at once I had it.

You know, once I had this, the steps I could climb for the rest of my life were different. Without that story, how would I have made editor-in-chief? How would I lead reporters, lead a team? Everything I have to stand on comes from that one story, and its reach has lasted right up to today. When people think of you, they still think of that story."

"But it also knocked me sideways. After I came back I had no appetite for routine assignments, and the way I saw and understood a lot of things changed at the root; what I used to mind, I stopped minding. I had seen life and death, and money, buying an apartment, dating — it all struck me as trivial shit. If I couldn't afford an apartment, I couldn't afford one.

I was in the middle of a lawsuit over my apartment then, and at the time that lawsuit was a grave thing: the apartment I'd bought might be taken back. I started it in early 2008 and fought it until 2011 — three years. When it began I thought my life was finished. I didn't want to fight; I wanted to run, to go home to Fuzhou. But after coming back from the earthquake, after seeing those people's courage, their toughness, the way they held on to life, I felt I should keep at it in Beijing and not let things that look so serious break me — they amount to nothing. So what if I fight the lawsuit to the end? Keep fighting.

I think it was a very good change in my life. I got stronger inside, and nothing could knock me down.

I stopped minding money so much. I used to think staying alive in Beijing was hard and you had to be careful with money. Afterward I didn't care — spend it. Save it for what? As long as you're happy."

During the interview Lin Tianhong laughed a lot — sometimes at himself, and even when he came to something wrenching, or to death, he could laugh it off with a joke.

"I think the effect was 80% good. When I was in the disaster zone a good friend from Fuzhou called and asked, 'How is it, what have you learned?' I said, 'Brother, eight characters for you: life is short, take your pleasure now.' (laughs)

That's not defeatist — why would it be defeatist? I think it's a very positive attitude to life. Whatever comes at you, there's no need to tremble: when soldiers come, meet them with generals; when the flood comes, block it with earth. Nothing is such a big deal.

Afterward I moved to editing at Freezing Point and wrote now and then, but the fight was gone. I wasn't interested in taking part in ordinary assignments; I could probably knock those stories out in my sleep.

My boss could see the state I was in. I'm not resting on my laurels — I truly couldn't work up interest in ordinary stories.

Once he and I were in a car and he needled me sideways: 'I've been an editor all these years, and the reporters I look down on most are the ones who live off a single story their whole life.' I said: 'What if it's two?'

That was exactly where my head was, because in 2011 my other story, The People Will Vote With Their Feet, won Southern Weekly's annual salute again. So I figured that must be as far as it goes, and that's when I really wanted to leave — to go out and have a look.

China Youth Daily is, after all, a state-system outlet. It wasn't that there was nowhere to rise — by the time I left they were about to promote me to deputy division chief — but I thought, don't squat in that slot.

I'm someone driven very much by interest. By then writing had become manual labor for me, and there was no fun in it. Flat, no interest. It stopped being fun.

Maybe a big event would have made a difference, but how many big events are there? None. The Luzhou and Yushu earthquakes afterward didn't amount to anything. A colleague asked me: 'The Yushu earthquake — are you going?' I said, 'Whoever wants to go, goes.'

I stayed at Freezing Point until 2011. When I left I was 32, taking home 70,000 to 80,000 yuan a year. For a 32-year-old man scraping by in Beijing, that's flat-out destitute. (laughs)

I got married in 2009. An income like that covers food and shelter, but if you're going to have a child you obviously want them to have a better education.

Even if China Youth Daily had offered me 200,000 yuan I'd have left — and going from 70,000-80,000 to 200,000 was impossible; our editor-in-chief made a bit over 10,000 a month."

"I left and took a new job as assistant editor-in-chief at China Weekly, 200,000 yuan a year. I lasted six months. Then Renwu launched and Li Haipeng called me over.

I was at Renwu for more than two years. We really did throw ourselves at making that magazine — shooting photos, shooting covers, spending tens of thousands of words on one profile. The people you dealt with were different too. At China Youth Daily, Freezing Point tended to look at small people; once I was at a commercial outlet I spent more time on big names, or on more entertaining special packages that China Youth Daily couldn't have done.

I don't think Renwu trained me in anything; Renwu was pure output. I turned everything I'd stored up into something I could give away there — burning myself for fuel. Looking back, training those Renwu kids was actually the satisfying part: taking a group of blank sheets and turning them into pretty good reporters, getting their work in front of a lot of people.

But Renwu went flat too — boring, back to standard procedure, nothing fresher to see. I'd met everyone there was to meet: the top stars, the businessmen, the good hosts; I'd interviewed Bai Yansong. And that was that. Everything became standard procedure. I knew how to break a story down, which angles it would come from, what the assembled thing would look like. When you can close your eyes and run the whole thing in your head, where's the point?"

After leaving Renwu in 2014, Lin Tianhong got offers from Tencent, Sina, the Wanda Group and others, exactly as he had expected. He claims he has never blown an interview: "Normally I might be a 70, but I'm the kind who can go off at 120 in an instant."

He chose Wanda. That year the group's revenue reached 242.4 billion yuan, its ninth straight year growing faster than 30%.

Lin Tianhong joined Wanda's Corporate Culture Center, mainly to run the in-house magazine. He has always priced himself high, and he entirely agreed with his Wanda superiors that the job was a waste of him.

But for a man changing careers at 35, the in-house magazine was the thing he could pick up at once, and the safest bet.

A year earlier, his former Freezing Point colleague Zhang Wei had started a personal official account, which grew into Xinshixiang. Lin Tianhong badly wanted out of the swamp too.

The ex-journalists' "roads to riches" seem to have given him a good deal of confidence.

Zhu Defu, former editor-in-chief of China Weekly and Beijing Times, joined Alibaba in 2010 as a group vice president. Gu Jianbing, Yan Qiao and Yang Lei of 21st Century Business Herald became Alibaba PR directors. Chen Liang of Nanfang Daily became PR director at Alipay.

In 2014, Alibaba put 500 million yuan into 21st Century Media, part of the Nanfang Media Group, for a 20% stake.

Lin Tianhong says he does not envy the journalists who went to Alibaba before him, but he mentioned more than once in the interview that they had long since reached "financial freedom."

He says his own appetite for things is very low, but his child must have the best of everything: "Everything for the child is the best there is."

"I didn't want to stay in media, and I was never going to be a civil servant, so what was left but a company? So go to a company and see — do PR.

I have no snobbery about PR, never have. On what grounds would I look down on it? Look down on what? Every industry is an industry — are reporters something special? My attitude has always been healthy. I look down on particular people, never on a whole industry.

Besides, 2014 was the year traditional journalists were all switching tracks; I was one of the late ones. Several good friends left media for Alibaba PR very early, and after the IPO they were all financially free. A lot of them don't work anymore; some run their own funds and invest, one went to Canada, opened a Chinese restaurant, bought an ice hockey team, that kind of life. The hockey team friend got bored after two years and came back to work in China.

Anyway, most people hop from company to company, because hopping raises your price."

"Some old colleagues are still at Renwu. Everyone who stayed had their own reason, and most of them are women — after they have a child, women lose the drive to climb. Reporters don't have to sit in an office, so they can look after the kid, and the money is decent.

Most of the women are like that; the men basically all left, and they're all financially free now.

I'm not envious. So they buy a big villa and I think, huh, not bad — but I really don't have a strong appetite for things. To this day I wear plain T-shirts from NetEase Yanxuan; I own no labels. The biggest expense at home is the child. Everything for the child is the best there is.

I had several options at the time: Tencent, Sina, a few other companies; several places sent offers. Then I decided on Wanda — that's a seriously impressive Chinese company, and if you're going, go to the best one.

Once I got there I found the place ran on a different logic from media. I used to think media was the truth, a set of values for a life, the commanding height of how you see the world. Once I was inside I discovered media is actually the minority.

China's real logic is down below. Media is the logic at the top, the thing that sets the ceiling. You see it more and more clearly — companies, the grassroots of third- and fourth-tier cities, that's the real China. Media is fairly rarefied, a kind of enclave. And looking at it today, that enclave doesn't exist anymore. It's gone.

Back in 2014 everyone in our department was in a very high income bracket; starting salaries there ran from 700,000-800,000 yuan up to more than a million. When I arrived I ran a little survey: 'Do you read magazines and newspapers?'

Out of more than 20 people, one subscribed to a newspaper — a pet newspaper.

There were young people in the department too, and they didn't read them either. Later, at Alibaba, the Lei Yang case came up — the man they said was beaten to death by police in Huilongguan, Changping, over soliciting a prostitute. Then you listen to what the kids born in the 1990s in our department are saying to each other, and you feel everything you did in media was a fucking waste.

The only people you can influence are the ones who want to be influenced — a tiny number.

I couldn't go back to media now; there's no sense in going back from any angle — your curiosity, your interest, your income, the career you've built, the range of skills you have. Go back for what?

I do think a young person straight out of school gets a lot out of two years in media — training you wouldn't get at a place like Wanda, where you'd just be one bolt in a machine. In media the whole of you improves: how you deal with people, how you gather and analyze material. Come out of media with that and you can do well in any industry.

But it isn't a place you can stay in for long.

My main job at Wanda was the in-house magazine, with more than 100,000 readers, spending more money than Renwu did — the company was that rich. Several million, up to ten million yuan of costs a year went through my hands. For one company magazine.

I joined Wanda in 2014, changing careers at 35. I wanted to take a risk, but not a pure risk — it had to be safe, because the cost of switching at that point was too high. If it weren't safe there'd be trouble. So I went to the Corporate Culture Center. First, I knew in-house magazines cold. Second, the Corporate Culture Center is where all of the group's information passes through; every exit and entrance is there. I could get to know every department and every subsidiary fast. People there understand the parent company better than anyone in other departments, and that suited what I wanted — to see how a company actually runs, what its real logic is.

There's a lot of gossip in that place too, because you're close to the boss and you know what these big bosses are thinking about and doing. For a stretch I followed Wang Jianlin every day, watching how he operated, and all of it was new stimulus for me, new experience, growth. When I was at Renwu I interviewed Wang Jianlin too — how could the version of him in front of me then be the real one? He keeps another face for the press."

"I got no sense of achievement at Wanda. The salary was several times what I'd had and spending was a lot more comfortable, but beyond that, what achievement? It's only that in every new industry you learn a lot: you get to see how a new world runs, how these people understand the world, what abilities you need to live in it and how to acquire them.

At one Wanda team-building event I discovered my colleagues could laugh. Normally everyone was very quiet, very tight, very contained, not saying much. Whatever the leader said, they obeyed and executed — I have never seen that kind of execution anywhere else, Alibaba included.

Every Wanda subsidiary has a corporate-culture officer liaising with headquarters — more than 400 of them altogether. Say you post in the group: 'Headquarters is doing such-and-such today.' Ignore WeChat for ten minutes and there are 400-plus unread messages, all of them 'Received, received, received, received...'

Headquarters says: 'We're running a group-wide event. All corporate-culture officers change your personal avatar and your work-ID avatar to the standard one. Before 3 p.m.' At 2:50 you look — whoosh, all changed, like an army. Can you imagine that in media?

Deeper than that is your relationship with the boss. I used to joke around with Lao Du however I liked; Li Haipeng and I swore at each other.

At Wanda my boss said: 'Tianhong, don't you know how to write a news brief?' Inside I thought, fuck, I've won Southern Weekly's annual Media Salute. What I said was: 'You're right, boss, the criticism is fair, I haven't written briefs.' And I had to take it with a smile.

Every company has its mess — the scheming, the office fights, all of it. I don't play those games; I came as a passer-through, to see what it was like. I'd planned it in advance: Wanda has a lot of subsidiaries, and in the end I wanted to run a business. The corporate culture department was only a bridge.

So later I went to Wanda Pictures. I was 40; it was time to bury myself in one line of work. I wanted to make films, and film was where my interest was anyway. After eight months at headquarters an opening came and I took it. From 2015 to now I've been in film, and I think I'll stay in it.

After Wanda I spent two years at Alibaba Pictures. At first there was a sense of achievement: do the promotion well, get everyone to hear about the film, decent box office — that's achievement, something you can see directly. And I picked up a new skill, so in the film business I have a craft of my own.

The trouble with film promotion is that you know perfectly well the thing is a pile of shit and you have to package it as ice cream — and it's still shit, and you still want to make ice cream. If that's the case, why not make the content yourself?

That's connected to my coming to Shanghai, to ONE, to make content. Part of it was wanting to leave Beijing — the smog was too bad — and Haipeng happened to be here and asked me to come."

In 2011, a piece Lin Tianhong had written for Freezing Point was used as the modern-prose reading passage on Fujian's college entrance exam in Chinese. He wrote on Weibo: "I figured it was my own article, so of course I'd know it and breeze through. Then I checked the answers and found there was a lot I couldn't do."

The post was reposted 60,000 times and drew 14,000 comments.

Lin Tianhong does not object to being called an early Weibo "KOL, public intellectual."

He thinks it was a period when a young person could actually get somewhere, and the time when he was at his most swaggering.

The man he measured himself against then is now his boss, Han Han. "At a certain stage of life, some of Han Han's views matched mine very closely. His view of the world was sound — that was the stage when he was acting as a citizen."

The talk of "Citizen Han Han" and "the intellectual" started in 2008, when Han Han got to the Sichuan disaster zone at the first opportunity, used his blog as a relay point for supplies, asked readers what the zone needed, and published Earthquake Reflections (《地震思考录》), which was reposted 320,000 times.

In a sense, Lin Tianhong and Han Han have traced remarkably similar paths over the past ten years.

They went from acting to saying nothing.

Lin Tianhong filed down his own edges and deleted every one of his Weibo posts. Han Han kept his account but gives almost no interviews, spending most of his time making films.

Lin Tianhong calls all of this "maturity."

"When I went to Wanda I shut the Weibo account down. I wanted to hide myself, because at a company the lower your profile the better — don't let people hold too much information about you. I stopped posting to Moments too; when I did it was company matters, or I'd use groups to hide it from colleagues. In an environment like that you learn to protect yourself, and the best way is to stay quiet. The more people know, the more you lose. Don't let anyone think you're a person with a personality.

Whatever needed deleting, I deleted. I stopped using Weibo, and I don't use it now.

I have nothing I want to say. What I want to say I say to friends. Be a KOL still? No meaning in it.

In Weibo's early days I did get hot a few times. One of my posts was among Sina's ten Weibo posts of 2011 — 2011, when Sina was at its peak and so was the public-intellectual role.

But now, what good does speaking do? None. Back then I wrote so much, filed so many stories, said so much — and what came of it? Isn't all of it sliding backward? The Southern Weekly fight was such an enormous thing; that was probably the last effort by the elite of Chinese traditional media to stand against the system, and it failed too.

Those guys are all doing PR at Alibaba now. There's no meaning in it. It isn't that people didn't back what you did — but it meant nothing, which makes it rather tragic. And then you find nobody cares; only your own small circle cares. Most people keep dancing and keep racing their horses, keep playing mahjong. Their lives were not affected in the slightest.

Listening to those Alibaba kids talk about the Lei Yang case, I thought: what the hell was all that we used to say about 'enlightenment' and 'civic consciousness'? These kids went to university too, and they still have no idea. And you have to understand that people like this are the overwhelming majority in China. So what's the meaning? My precious, limited life went into meaningless things.

Because there is no meaning, there is no desire.

Han Han too. Han Han has an exceptionally sound view of the world, and he's a very good boss. He used to write; now he doesn't say a word. He only cares about what interests him now — which is very much like me. We pay more and more attention to what's inside ourselves and don't care about what's outside. What could the outside do anyway? Today's kids born in the 1990s and 2000s — why would they care about serious things like that?

I'll just make my films. If I make them well they can still reach more people. As for saying Han Han has gone soft and greasy, I don't see it that way. I think it's a mature way of looking at the world.

Anything you keep doing has its effect; you just have to weigh the effect against what it costs.

When you're young you feel plenty of things can be spent freely. You say something, it goes nowhere, fine, so what? But as you get older and your energy runs shorter, you start thinking: I'll say this only if it produces ten parts of effect; for one part I might not bother. A person's energy is finite.

Take the Hongmao Medicinal Liquor business. In the old days it would have been beaten dead with one blow at the start; now it had to reach that stage before they got the man out. Back then it would have been unthinkable. There was a similar case: the county chief of Xifeng County sent police to Beijing to arrest a reporter, and by that afternoon it had gone through the whole reporting community, everyone posting on Weibo in support, and an apology came at once.

That was then. Now it's going backward. Nothing to be done.

When I think now that Freezing Point could publish something like that in 2006, it seems flatly impossible today. That people like us could hop around on Weibo the way we did and nobody came after me — impossible.

There's a safety calculation in my keeping quiet these days. First, I have to think of the company; second, I have to think of my family.

I have a family and a child now; they live in this country and they depend on me. From that angle I can't do anything that brings too much risk on me. I won't speak casually in public — you don't know where the state's line is now, and with censorship this severe it's very easy for something to go wrong. Why would I do that and bring that kind of trouble on myself?

I have several novels in development right now. If they're done well they'll leave something behind. At the very least I know what China's TV drama market is missing; let's see if I can put out good work and fill the gap. That's the most concrete thought I have.

I think what I'm doing now has real meaning. First, I have to be worth the salary my boss pays me. Second, I owe it to these people — I lead them, and they can't come out of it without growth, without their price going up. Third, I really can make some good stories.

I've always been pleased with myself, and I'm quite happy now. I think the greatest thing you gain by growing up is learning how to get along with this world better, more peacefully. There's an old line: after you've seen a lot of the world's ugliness and darkness, if you can still be full of hope and curiosity about it, that's the truly good attitude.

I think that's exactly what I am."

Lin Tianhong will not accept that he is a cynic; he only thinks his way of getting along with the world is neither to fight it nor to change it.

"I have a friend named Jia Jia — look at what he's doing now. He used to be that sort of person; what is he doing now? I think in my generation of traditional journalists, people who think this way must be the overwhelming majority. There's simply no meaning in it. If you really had the courage to change things, and something really could be changed, I'd say a sacrifice like ours might be worth something."

"But then you find there's no meaning. What can you change? Nothing at all."

Nine days ago, on May 19, 2018, Lin Tianhong reposted the only Weibo post he has shared in the past year.

It came from He Yanguang, the photographer who went to the Sichuan disaster zone with him in 2008 to report Going Home. He Yanguang wrote that on May 16 he had received a WeChat plea for help from Liu Zhizhen, the wife of Cheng Linxiang in Going Home. The house their "benefactor" had promised them was still unsettled after eight years of delay, and on May 11, 2018 — the day before the tenth anniversary of the Wenchuan earthquake — the government took her husband, Cheng Linxiang, away.

As of publication, the post had been reposted 0 times and drawn 2 comments. Neither had anything to do with the family.

Cover image: unsplash