"Young People Are Supposed to Stir Things Up and Have Some Fun": Club Life for 9 Young People | Wudaokou Is Full of Young People, Part 3

The eleven universities around Beijing's Wudaokou hold together the curiosity and the wish to be around other people of some hundred thousand students. The hundreds of club events held every week are one outlet for that.

Every Friday at 6 pm, Ming Zheng turns up on time at Dufeng Coffee, behind the Tsinghua sociology department's teaching building, and talks for three or four hours with a few members of a club called Zhengziyan. They call it a "reading group," and the topics always circle back to the classic texts of the various schools of Marxism.

At 8, Guo Qi sets up a telescope on the athletic field at Beijing Language and Culture University to look at the lunar maria, the craters, or how the positions of Jupiter's moons have shifted. This "roadside astronomy" runs until 11 pm and draws dozens of onlookers.

Yu Chonghan is always busy on Saturday daytime. Two or three times a month, from 9 am to noon and 2 pm to 5 pm, she volunteers as a guide at the Geological Museum, 10 kilometers south of the China University of Geosciences, walking visitors from the Earth Hall on the first floor, through the Mineral Hall and the Gem Hall on the second, to the Paleontology Hall on the third — "it's a thrill." She has kept this up for four years, and more than 2,000 visitors have heard her explain the collection.

And no matter how many people show up, every Saturday at 8 pm, Chu Xiankun or one of his club mates sits down on time in Room 18, on basement level two of Dormitory Building 35 in Peking University's Yenching Garden, to screen a film. They gave this makeshift space of under 80 square meters a plain, solemn name: the Yuanpei Underground Cinema.

The eleven universities around Wudaokou hold together the curiosity and the wish to be around other people of some hundred thousand students, and the hundreds of club events held every week are one outlet for that. Young people take different things away from them: freedom, frustration, curiosity, a sense of belonging, self-doubt, the habit of acting, or just the noise and company.

Here are the stories of nine of them.

1. "The Vegetarian Who Acts"

Ouyang Huiyu became, in a lot of people's eyes, "the vegetarian who acts," and that has something to do with the piece of performance art he staged two years ago, which a lot of people disliked.

In his third year studying urban planning at the School of Architecture, he took an elective called Animal Ethics and the Culture of Protecting Life. The final assignment offered 20 possible topics. One of them was "stage a creative, high-impact piece of performance art promoting animals."

Ouyang thought of the newly built cafeteria. It was the work of a School of Architecture professor: a wide entrance, and a skylight of clear glass that let sunlight in directly. He rounded up a few friends and they spent the night making props. At noon on the day of the performance, when foot traffic was at its heaviest, they covered the glass roof with a layer of red film and hung lifelike animal dolls by the neck from the skylight into the middle of the room, where they bobbed up and down.

On campus the performance drew the criticism that it was "too radical." Some people connected the stunt to the Vegetarian Association, and even set up a rival Carnivore Association, which handed out fried chicken nuggets during the new semester's "Hundred Clubs" recruitment drive.

"The whole world is one giant Carnivore Association, so I think it's pretty normal that 300-odd people on the Tsinghua campus would form a group to oppose me — there's no need to fight it," Ouyang Huiyu said. Academically it went well: he got the highest grade in the class for Animal Ethics and the Culture of Protecting Life.

Ouyang's interest in the animal rights movement also started with that class. He had been a vegetarian since his freshman year, but back then his reason was that meat is inefficient, an argument he took from a UN Food and Agriculture Organization report: "One acre of land used to raise livestock can meet the food needs of only 180 people; the same acre planted with soybeans can feed 3,230." After the course ended, Ouyang decided animal rights would make a good way in. Anything to do with social justice pulled at him, and because animal rights are more overlooked than LGBT rights or racial discrimination, he thought throwing himself into that would change more.

In late September 2016, Ouyang Huiyu joined the Vegetarian Association, and soon after started working on getting a vegetarian counter opened in a campus dining hall.

The association had been pushing for this for several years without success. Ouyang concluded the reasons were that it talked to the administration too rarely and that its arguments weren't sharp enough. After he took over, he and other members wrote letters every week to every channel they could find — the Dining Services Center, the Green University Office, the International Students Office. The breakthrough came when the Dining Services Center failed to reply within 60 days: Ouyang went to the Letters and Visits Office and got one of the three slots to present a proposal on the day school leaders met with students.

The association then cut its 80-page proposal down to 20 pages and boiled the argument down to two points — "humanistic care" (respecting the needs of vegetarian students and faculty) and "a green campus" — both tied to Tsinghua's push to build an international campus. That happened to land with the vice president in the room, who said at the meeting that years earlier, taking Israeli visitors to a dining hall, he had watched two members of the delegation refuse to eat because there was no vegetarian food.

But that vice president didn't oversee logistics, and the vegetarian counter went nowhere after that. Ouyang applied to attend another open forum, this one on "campus dining assurance," and found a different vice president. This time his argument was that "the school should keep its channels to students more open." Five months later, the first vegetarian counter on the Tsinghua campus opened.

Ouyang Huiyu is now a graduate student in urban planning at the School of Architecture. He turns up more and more often at lectures, sharing sessions and reading groups, talking about how clubs get their message out, where the animal protection movement stands in China and abroad, and what role and what tactics university students have in it. A talk on a theme like that had just ended last Friday: "Toward a Multispecies Future: Animal Rights Activism on the Tsinghua Campus." Ouyang spoke to more than 20 people for two hours that day and talked himself hoarse. For a while he was also giving frequent interviews, each one running more than three hours on average.

"I've always been someone who acts, but acting needs tactics." Sitting in a coffee shop at Wansheng Jiayuan in a checked shirt and black-framed glasses, Ouyang spoke slowly, weighing each word. That day he was meeting a friend doing a master's in philosophy on animal ethics, to work out how to link up university vegetarian associations — a loose, flat organization that would let the associations at different schools share what they have. The arrangement, they thought, should be "moderately decentralized," should "be representative," should "recognize the division of roles universities play in the vegetarian movement," "put the idea of a vegetarian university into practice," and "increase exchange with vegetarians abroad."

Earlier this year Ouyang went to Germany for an international vegan training camp, where he met one of its co-founders, Melanie Joy, and he is now helping bring her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows to China. At the end of June he turned up at the Animal Rights National Conference in Los Angeles.

I asked Ouyang why, given how much animal rights interest him, he doesn't go and do research on them like his friend instead of staying with urban planning. He answered: "The animal rights movement and urban planning connect up to some degree — both deal with relations between people, and between people and non-human beings."

A member of the Vegetarian Association recently found out that an elective on campus has started using white mice for dissection. They are talking to the people who run the course, and plan to make this the association's next main issue: alternatives to animal testing.

2. "Theory That Isn't Practiced Loses Its Meaning"

Analyzing theory can't stay on paper; it has to be joined to practice. That, Ming Zheng said, is the condition for discussing Marxist theory at all.

Ming Zheng studies in Tsinghua's sociology department. When he set up the Contemporary Capitalism Research Group — Zhengziyan for short — two years ago, it was only a project team translating texts in economic anthropology. After the project ended, three members decided to keep the group alive and hold academic and theoretical discussions: economic theory, the labor theory of value, theories of capitalist crisis. Beyond the reading group, members start their own field research, and now and then bring it back as material for the discussion.

The reading group meets at Dufeng Coffee near Zhishan Road on campus, and that is where we did the interview. Ming Zheng sat on a rattan chair on the second-floor terrace holding a thermos, at ease in a familiar routine; the canvas tote on his shoulder had a line drawing of Foucault printed on it.

Fang Ran was one of the three founders. Most of his research has to do with workers. Over the May Day holiday in the spring of his freshman year, Fang Ran went to Yizhuang to live a day as a temp worker: he arrived the night before and found a hotel for 20 or 30 yuan; at six or seven the next morning he handed his ID card to an unlicensed labor broker, was loaded onto a minibus and driven to a factory to work, straight through until 8 or 9 that night, then rode the minibus back to the hotel and got his ID card back. The assembly-line work needed no real skill, but it did demand a practiced hand.

Nobody knew in advance which factory the minibus would stop at, or what the job would be. That day Fang Ran was sent to a printing plant. His first task was sticking anti-counterfeit labels onto copies of Five Years of College Entrance Exams, Three Years of Mock Tests. Fang Ran thought the foreman was having a go at him — "he saw my glasses and figured I'd never done manual work, so he made it hard" — because to get a label on straight you had to slow down, and if you sped up the labels went on crooked, while quite a few other workers got the easier job of slipping in the answer sheets.

After a few hours he was moved to packing books: stacking them into cardboard boxes and loading the boxes onto trucks. This was May Day 2014, less than a month after García Márquez died, and the whole workshop was full of copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude. None of the dozen or so workers cared. The work was dull and repetitive, and by the end of the day careless workers pushing carts past would knock into the stacked books, denting the covers. Ever since, the first thing Fang Ran notices when he walks into a bookstore is a dent on a cover, and it puts him back in that Yizhuang workshop.

Ming Zheng had something like it happen to him. In his sophomore year he worked the front desk at a district government office in Zhuhai, where he met a man from Jiangxi who had just got off the train looking for work. The man carried a plastic bucket holding everything he owned and had no interest in going online — he wanted to ask around in person. Ming Zheng went with him from the afternoon into the evening, and they parted at the long-distance bus terminal. The man looked happy when they said goodbye, because the terminal was covered in flyers advertising jobs.

For the first half of this year, Fang Ran was mostly in Shenzhen. In 2017, Hunan Province's Institute for Occupational Disease Prevention and Control began checking the health of people with local household registration and found several hundred with pneumoconiosis, some of them getting worse. Most of them had spent years working in Shenzhen, so early this year they went there to petition for compensation. Fang Ran took part in interviewing them — in Shenzhen and Dongguan in January, in Hunan in May.

Most came from Sangzhi County (in Zhangjiajie), Leiyang County and Miluo County in Hunan. Many had done foundation work in Shenzhen as drillers or blasters and breathed dust for years. They had generally left home to find work in the early 1990s or the early 2000s, relatives bringing in relatives, never signed a contract with an employer, and had no social insurance record. Most cannot prove an employment relationship, and so cannot claim work-injury compensation. Whatever they saved went into building houses. "The houses look good, but they were built on debt. A lot of houses in Sangzhi have beautiful exteriors and not one decent piece of furniture inside; some don't even have doors," Fang Ran said.

Workers from Hunan had already run a compensation campaign in 2009. At that time, whether or not an employment relationship could be proven, anyone diagnosed with pneumoconiosis at any stage from early to stage three could get a humanitarian payment of 70,000 to 130,000 yuan. Those who could prove employment and social insurance could get more than 200,000. But the money does not hold much back: pneumoconiosis can be eased, never cured; a claim runs like a marathon, and by the time a ruling comes many have already run up heavy medical debt, while their children still need money for school, for marriage, and for looking after the old.

When he went to Miluo in May, Fang Ran found at least 40-odd workers there with pneumoconiosis. Some had trouble speaking and kept clearing their throats; others had worse complications and would be short of breath within an hour or two without an oxygen machine. Even a cheap oxygen machine costs two or three thousand yuan and is loud enough to break up a night's sleep. To keep their ribs off their lungs, patients tend to sleep on their sides. In the late stages, in order to breathe, their bodies curl by themselves into a kneeling posture, and stay that way until they die.

Some people, knowing they were ill, could not accept it and refused to take part in the health checks or the campaign. Others took it more calmly. Fang Ran met a father who told his own child not to rush into work to earn money for treatment but to spend it on school instead, because he believed college was the only way to a future. "Then you see that this isn't one person's 70,000-yuan problem. It's a family's problem."

For Fang Ran and Ming Zheng, Zhengziyan is a good place to try using theory on what is actually there, and that chance doesn't come up often elsewhere. With only a dozen-odd members, the discussion can go deeper. These young people are also hot-blooded: whenever something significant happens on or off campus, they write commentary and publish it on their WeChat account, even though most of it has since been deleted — the Tsinghua security guards' compensation dispute, dormitory construction that went ahead without asking students, sexual harassment on campus, the Daxing fire.

Ming Zheng has decided to do a PhD. Fang Ran plans to go on studying sociology at the University of Hong Kong. He thinks academia has already turned out plenty of "good stuff," but that not enough people have joined it to what is happening outside, and he wants to work on writing and getting the word out.

3. "I Want to Build a Team That Can Actually Play a Match"

American football clubs at Beijing universities are rare; most schools can only manage flag football. The difference between the two comes down to gear: one wears helmets, the other doesn't. Which is to say it comes down to money — a basic starter kit costs at least 2,000-odd yuan, and outfitting a full squad of at least 20 players takes 44,000 yuan. For a student club that is not a small sum.

Beijing Language and Culture University's Dianguang (Lightning) football club belongs to the second category, and Cai Haochen, who was made captain only last week, has one wish: to train this team, which is barely a team yet, into one that can play a match.

Cai Haochen, who is 1.77 meters tall, is called "Uncle" by his classmates. He was originally in the 2013 stage technology and performance engineering cohort at the Communication University of China, and has started over: he now studies digital media technology in BLCU's 2017 cohort.

In 2015, as a junior at the Communication University of China, he had already got to know Beijing's two big amateur football teams, the Cyclones and the Tieci. Together they had more than a hundred members and belonged to two different national amateur football leagues, practicing at weekends at Tsinghua and Beijing Jiaotong University respectively; most members already had jobs, with a few students who had studied abroad. Cai Haochen's reason for joining was simple: "I'd been building muscle and wanted a contact sport to find out how strong I actually was."

BLCU used to have a football team called Sparta, made up almost entirely of international students. When they graduated, the team dissolved. Dianguang was formed to build a team of Chinese students. The whole squad is currently only a dozen-plus people, and only Cai Haochen and one former Sparta member, an Iranian, had ever played football before. The Iranian plays quarterback; Cai Haochen plays wide receiver or running back.

Training is nominally scheduled for Tuesdays and Fridays, but Dianguang sessions are often called off for lack of turnout — usually only four or five people come, they rotate often, and all of them start from zero. A 90-minute session breaks down into 30 minutes of conditioning, 45 minutes of skills instruction and 15 minutes of stretching. Cai Haochen handles the five beginner skills modules: passing and catching, blocking, tackling, running back and cornerback.

In nearly a year with the club there has been only one occasion that counted as a game rather than practice: against a visiting group of British middle- and high-school students on an exchange. Dianguang lost.

Cai Haochen is still keen. He likes anything cool and fun. Besides being BLCU's only running back and wide receiver, he may also be the only person at BLCU who can do popping, and he is deputy captain of BLCU's Buster Crew street dance club.

On June 10 the dance club performed in the arts troupe's showcase, closing the show. "Two or three hundred people performing and only a few dozen watching," Cai Haochen said, sounding sorry about it.

On stage his mind kept going back to CUC's DE street dance club. In 2015 they took part in the Tianxuan D-Dance Capital University Street Dance Elite Invitational, which drew 43 competing schools and sold 1,500 tickets. DE was among the best teams then, and Cai Haochen loved the feeling of going up against people that good.

His classmates from those years have scattered. Some went home to take over the family business, some are hosts at CCTV, some dance full-time, making a living from commercial gigs, teaching and competitions. Cai Haochen's own clock seems to have stopped on campus. At every reunion, old friends say, with a trace of envy, "Damn, where did you find the nerve to do college all over again?"

Cai Haochen is at peace with where he is. Alongside his studies he has held several jobs — editor at Elite Shopping Guide, and writing proposals for LeEco and BAIC at new-media ad agencies like Marry Internet and Youxiang. Advertising is a brutal market, and both of those agencies have since vanished.

Cai Haochen talks about it like someone who has already been through it, without the worry about the future that people his age usually carry. "Enjoy the present," he says. Beyond coaching the team well, his biggest problem right now is finding a new name for Dianguang. "Football team names all seem to be in this one style. Beijing International Studies University's team is called Snow Wolf, China Agricultural University's is the Diggers — ha."

4. "If You Like It, Read It; If You Love It, Write It"

Zhen Sitong, 21, was born in Huludao, Liaoning; her uncle served in the military, and her family's home is barely a 10-minute walk from a naval base. That is how she explains her interest in military affairs.

Because she was lively in the freshman group chat, Zhen Sitong was pulled by an upperclassman into the roughly 40-member Military Enthusiasts Alliance as soon as she began studying international affairs and international relations at BLCU in 2015. Two of the alliance's activities are the best known: the annual Huashan Contest of Swords, a military-knowledge competition among Beijing universities, and a national-defense essay contest. Zhen Sitong rarely enters the main competitions but enjoys the everyday training and the fieldwork around it — wargaming exercises, studying the War of Liberation, collecting oral histories from air force veterans.

Over her three years at BLCU, though, her more important role has been president of the Mystery Fiction Club, which she will hand to her successor once this summer ends.

The Mystery Fiction Club is new at BLCU, founded only in 2016. She describes its 60-odd mystery fans as "people who aren't very good at showing warmth" and who "are probably most at ease alone with a mystery novel."

Zhen Sitong started reading mysteries in fourth grade, with a bootleg three-volume Sherlock Holmes her father had bought in college, full of typos, which she read with a correction tape in hand, fixing them as she went. By middle school she was reading Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage and Jacques Futrelle's The Thinking Machine stories. In high school most of her mystery reading happened under her desk, mostly Chinese titles — Huyan Yun's The Curse of the Yellow Emperor, Yuan Ning's Cases of Judge Dee in Tang China, and work by Anbushao, Yan Guang and Lu Qiucha, mostly out of the magazines Mystery and Mystery World. In college her shelf took on a big batch of Japanese writers: Keigo Higashino of the social school, and Soji Shimada and Yukito Ayatsuji of the new orthodox school.

When she graduated high school, the teachers returned the books they had confiscated one by one; Zhen Sitong's pile was the tallest, mostly mystery novels. "This high," she said, sitting in Honey Coffee on the fourth floor of the BLCU cafeteria, raising her hand above her head.

Zhen Sitong met the senior who founded the Mystery Fiction Club in a class on Empirical Criminal Psychology at Beijing Normal University. The two held a short, direct interview at that same table in Honey Coffee. "Why do you always wear black?" "I like black." "Hm, that's pretty cool. What's your sign?" "Scorpio." "Hm, that sign tends to think clearly."

The club's everyday activities turned out not to be what she had pictured. Not "a group of people huddled together studying mystery novels," but something closer to entertainment. There are occasional escape-room outings (later paused for lack of money), and, starting this school year, CRIMASTER (short for Logical Deduction Challenge, a crime-solving game).

The only fairly regular event is the Treasure Hunt, a campus puzzle competition started in 2012 by a league of mystery clubs from more than 20 Beijing universities. It runs two seasons a year — late March to late May, and late October to early December — with one event a week during each season, and the schools take turns designing a story-driven puzzle to fit their own campus. Competing clubs travel to the host campus to solve it on site, and are ranked by score at the end.

BLCU last hosted on December 9 last year. At the time, Professor Yang and his "internet addiction center," which used electric shocks as treatment, were in the news, and Zhen Sitong and other members designed a puzzle that pointed at the case. The Treasure Hunt was set in a huge internet addiction center; the characters included a weak-willed principal named Ma Shanliang, a scheming assistant named Liu Shan, an admissions officer, a reporter from the Legal Evening News, and three students. Competing schools had to work out who had killed a student and also reconstruct what had actually happened. Anyone caught by a patrolling NPC in the middle of the puzzle was locked in a small dark room for 10 to 15 minutes.

The whole thing ran four hours, and Beijing Normal University and the China University of Mining and Technology tied for first. Talking about mystery clubs at other schools, Zhen Sitong sounded a little envious: Beijing Normal always tops the Treasure Hunt rankings; Renmin University has a lot of members and a thick mystery-reading culture; Beijing Jiaotong University was one of the first to host the competition and has a long history; Fudan's club is known for its accomplished alumni and can always get a well-known mystery writer to come back and give a talk.

Zhen Sitong hopes BLCU's Mystery Fiction Club can find something of its own too. At the very least, keep the club's activities from stopping at entertainment, bring in more people from outside the genre's core readership, and build up members' own ability to write mystery fiction.

In the school year just finished, the club began regularly publishing "mystery salon" posts introducing unsolved cases and recommending good writers. For the latest recruitment drive, the club wrote to 20 or 30 Chinese mystery novelists asking for a few words of encouragement. To the members' surprise, many wrote back. Lu Qiucha, once a member of Fudan's own mystery club, had a friend deliver several signed new books; Huyan Yun sent back a letter of some 3,000 words.

In it he wrote: "If you like it, read it; if you love it, write it… Throughout history, in writing as in anything else, if you want to get something done, what matters most is not talent and not luck. It is keeping at it without asking whether you will succeed."

5. "The Rarest Sights in the Sky Are the Most Exciting"

Guo Qi has two wishes: to see a total solar eclipse, and to see the aurora.

"For a total eclipse, the Earth's distance from the sun has to be 40 times its distance from the moon. You can't arrange it, you have to be lucky. Beijing won't see another total solar eclipse until 2035," she said, fast, over the phone. Whenever the talk turns to astronomy, her speech runs unusually smooth and quick, almost without thought.

Last August, Guo Qi got the first wish. The Alliance of Beijing University Astronomy Clubs, known as Beitianmeng, had posted on its WeChat account organizing a group of astronomy fans to travel together to Madras, Oregon, for a total solar eclipse. There were more than 30 of them; the youngest was still in elementary school, brought by his parents; the oldest was a grandfather from Taiwan in his sixties who chases eclipses around the world and has seen more than a dozen.

The naked eye doesn't give as good a view as NASA's live stream, but no live stream can match being there. The town, with a permanent population of 10,000, took in 100,000 people over those two days. With every hotel full, people pitched tents across a huge stretch of farmland, and the colored sea of tents made the place look like Coachella. Guo Qi's Chinese group arrived two days early, and it still took two hours of traffic to drive into the campsite. At 11 am local time, the moment the eclipse went total, the whole campsite broke into shouting; Guo Qi, in the middle of it, shouted herself hoarse.

Like Cai Haochen of BLCU's football club, Guo Qi has also started over. She was originally in BLCU's 2016 cohort studying Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, didn't like it, and switched to computer science, repeating her freshman year with the 2017 cohort. Her attitude to clubs runs the same way: only do what you love. "Once you take something on it's a responsibility. You can't let it be mediocre."

BLCU's astronomy club is the only club Guo Qi has joined. A year and a half after it was founded it still has no telescope of its own; of its roughly 200 members, only a dozen or so turn up to any given event; it is less popular than the astrology club, and barely registers within Beitianmeng.

After becoming president, Guo Qi spent 1,000 yuan of her own money on the club's first telescope, and got two more out of sponsors she found at a Beitianmeng conference. Whenever she has time and the sky is clear, she carries a telescope out to the athletic field, once a week, from 8 pm until the field locks up at 11. Even when club members don't come, it always draws onlookers. What there is to see changes with the season — the window for Jupiter and Saturn is not year-round, only April, May and June; and after the 20th day of the lunar month, the moon doesn't rise until well past midnight. She calls this "roadside astronomy."

Members are keener on trips than on roadside astronomy: a bus out to the Beijing suburbs — Miyun, Guanting Reservoir, Simatai, Gubeikou or Tanghekou — two days and a night, watching a meteor shower.

"There are three big meteor showers visible from the northern hemisphere, and you have to go around the peak. Each shower has a predicted value, ZHR, the zenithal hourly rate. In the best conditions you'd see 120 ZHR an hour, which is two meteors a minute." Guo Qi was off again in her unusually fluent explaining mode.

Her most memorable meteor shower was not with club members. It was last December, when Guo Qi and two friends made a sudden trip to Bulaotun. They had meant to go at the weekend, but the weather kept being bad. On a Tuesday night, with the sky finally clear, the three of them rented a car on the spot despite a full day of classes the next morning, and didn't head back until 4 am. The sky was black and the Geminids went over their heads. "It was so beautiful."

Guo Qi says she is more interested in nature now — more into hiking, cycling and looking at flowers and birds than at telescopes. But asked what she most wants to do next, the first thing out of her mouth is still: "See the aurora!"

6. "Top Students and Rock Obsessives"

The China University of Geosciences' Yuanshi Club was not always called that. In its 14 years it went by "Geo-Museum Volunteer Guides" for 12 of them, and its main work was providing volunteer guides for the China Geological Museum — the only student club the museum works with.

The Geological Museum is 102 years old, and its halls have looked much the same for the past decade or so: 2,500 square meters, 200,000 geological specimens, and five halls — Earth, Minerals and Rocks, Gems, Prehistoric Life, and National Land Resources. The young people who serve it keep changing. Fang Linhao, the China University of Geosciences student from the 2001 cohort who started the program, is now a professor at the School of Earth Sciences at China University of Petroleum. The guide corps has grown from one person in 2004 to more than 30 today.

Yu Chonghan, a third-year graduate student at the university's School of Ocean Sciences, still goes to guide at the museum regularly, even after "retiring" last year. In a January 2017 post on QQ Zone she summed up what the experience had meant to her with a string of numbers: guide No. 14014110089, four years, 225 tours, 1,777 visitors served.

More than half of the guide corps are graduate or PhD students like her; there are few undergraduates below their junior year. Yu Chonghan and the club's new president, Zheng Ruixin, said to QDaily more than once that this is a professional squad of top students and rock obsessives. The daily stipend for guiding is 50 yuan; what keeps people at it is enthusiasm. This year 60 people interviewed and five were taken. Besides a five-minute self-introduction there is an exam on the field and tests in other specialties, about as hard as graduate entrance exams.

"Basically everyone who comes to the Geo-Museum is a geology enthusiast. We have to know the material — able to answer whatever visitors ask — and also speak well, be easy to approach, and not too ugly." At that last point the two of them fell about laughing.

Yu Chonghan first ran into geology in her first year of high school. Peking University was then running a summer elective for high schoolers, taught by PKU professors, with a choice of astronomy, paleontology, or Chinese/math/English. In the first term most students picked Chinese/math/English, while Yu Chonghan took astronomy and paleontology — each drew only about 10 students. By the second term, once students and parents realized the program counted for nothing in college admissions, most dropped out. Paleontology still had four professors assigned to it, and the class only needed four students to run, but even that was never filled.

Zheng Ruixin, the new president, is a junior at the Gemology School and wore a green peridot necklace to the interview. She met her boyfriend through the guide corps; in high school he had put on a mineral specimen exhibition and donated his whole collection to the school when he graduated. His biggest hobby is buying and selling rocks, every few days or once a month, and everyone in the club calls him the Mineral Hunter.

Talking about guiding, both used the word "thrill." Zheng Ruixin remembers a 9-year-old boy who came every week — himself a mineral collector, with his own WeChat account, and familiar with every hall. When a visitor asked why tourmaline picks up dust so easily, the boy answered for her: "Because friction creates a polarization effect at the two ends of the crystal." The two exchanged WeChat contacts and are now mineral-collecting friends.

One person Yu Chonghan can't forget is an elderly woman who, at the end of a tour, took out a jade bracelet wrapped in a handkerchief. Her daughter had paid a lot of money for it, the woman said, and she wanted to know whether it was real. The audience did not leave; they waited for the answer. Yu Chonghan could see at a glance that it was fake, but she wanted to spare the old woman's feelings without giving up her professional standing. "This bracelet is beautiful. And the feeling behind it is beyond price," she said.

The guide corps' old base was a student-run cafe called Little Rose, which lasted eight years on campus and has since closed. The site started as an empty lot for parking bicycles between the buildings in the faculty housing area, until a small duplex went up there. The space was only 40 or 50 square meters but had everything it needed; it was run by a past president of the Yuanshi Club, and Zheng Ruixin was once one of the helpers.

There was no menu. Whoever was on duty would post in the group chat, "Anyone want pizza?" and open up only once someone answered, starting from kneading the dough, three or four hours to bake a single pizza. Sometimes they simply cooked hotpot together and talked about rocks. The air in the place was free, and a white cat named Xiaoruan sat by the window keeping the young people company.

The turn came in 2014. For several years the guide corps had operated under the School of Geology's Youth Volunteer Association. As the corps grew, the association wanted to absorb the Yuanshi Club formally, taking a bigger part in running it day to day and vetting its WeChat account. Members did not want that. To them the plain, self-governing atmosphere they had was the most valuable thing about it.

To protect it, Yu Chonghan and another organizer tried to register the group as a school-level club under a new name, the Yuanshi Club, but ran into one obstruction after another. By 2016 the members gathered for a meal at McDonald's and decided that if they could not find a better way, they would disband.

As it happened, a director surnamed Bai at the Geological Museum heard about it and talked to the university, and the Yuanshi Club was registered.

For the 30-odd young people involved, the 14-year tradition held. Yu Chonghan still remembers that farewell meal that, luckily, never had to be a farewell. They call it the Great McDonald's Conference.

7. "It's Less That We Saved Literature Than That Literature Saved Us"

The University of Science and Technology Beijing's Rhino Literary Society publishes its literary journal, Against the Voyage (《反航》), twice a year, and every issue's title page carries the same line: "Pig's tail, beetle — either is fine, it's only that neither exists in this world."

The founder, Zhang Huaipeng, chose it. The pig's tail is the one on the baby in One Hundred Years of Solitude; the beetle is what Gregor turns into in The Metamorphosis. What Zhang Huaipeng meant was, "You can love magical realism, but it always has to come back down to real life."

Zhang Huaipeng was Tian Ye's predecessor as club president; after graduating he became a programmer. Tian Ye thinks highly of him. Zhang Huaipeng isn't much of a writer, but he can read — one look and he knows whether a manuscript is any good. The first issue of Against the Voyage carried a piece called "Lamento: Elegy — Dystopia" that the editorial board didn't much like, feeling it read like an essay rather than serious fiction. It was Zhang Huaipeng who pointed out that the first-person narration was modeled on Dazai Osamu, and only then did the rest of them see what it was doing.

Tian Ye is a junior studying industrial design at USTB. He likes Wang Xiaobo and Roberto Bolaño, and worked both names into his WeChat display name — "Wang Xiaobolaño Tianye." He wrote the launch statement for the Against the Voyage WeChat account in sweeping language — "We want to trace our way back to a lost golden age, to become the literary youth of a new generation" — but as if unsure of himself, ended by quoting Bolaño to shore up his own nerve: "Although I hear the song speak of war, of the heroic feats of a whole generation of young Latin Americans sacrificed, I understand that what it speaks of above all is courage, mirrors, desire and pleasure."

The Rhino Literary Society, nine years old, had long wanted to put out a serious literary journal — a slightly odd ambition at an engineering school known for metallurgy and materials science. Through four editions of the Rhino Literary Competition held from 2014 to 2017, the club built up a pool of young writers from various universities. Then, seeing the warm reception last year for Wenxi, a literary journal out of Minzu University of China, they finally got Against the Voyage started.

The journal has four sections: "Substance," "Feature," "Carving the Ox" and "Omnivore." "Substance" is mainly fiction; "Feature" runs pieces invited writers produce around the issue's theme; "Carving the Ox" and "Omnivore" hold criticism and personal essays.

There were compromises and difficulties along the way. The editors wanted more criticism, which they thought was the main way a magazine shows a point of view, but found they almost never received good criticism, so fiction had to carry the issue. With little money, Against the Voyage can only pay a token fee, 20 yuan a piece, so writers have little reason to submit and are slow to hand work in; the journal, planned as a quarterly, became a twice-yearly.

The response after publication was better than expected. The first issue sold more than 300 copies; the second, out this May, has already sold more than 100. The editors took it to the independent-magazine fairs run by Dandu and by 706 Youth Space, and found there that hardly any young people are making serious literary magazines — the rest were doing design magazines and poetry journals.

That made Tian Ye feel it was worth keeping up, because "I always feel that later on I'll end up doing things I like less."

Tian Ye's hometown is Nanyang, Henan. He went to elementary school in Beijing because both parents ran a business there. Because of household registration rules he went back to his hometown for middle school and lived with his grandparents. Later he tested into a key high school in a nearby city and began living entirely on his own, not living with his parents again until he got to USTB.

Through the most formative stretch of his adolescence, Tian Ye got used to his parents' absence and found comfort in literature. Next to the somewhat heavier Russian writers, he preferred Latin American magical realism, which he felt had the same epic weight but with more tension, more lightness, something fresh about it. As a writer he isn't disciplined — he writes only when he wants to — but he has kept the habit of watching the details of the people around him and noting down ideas. The bus conductor he once saw wearing six gold bracelets, for instance: "Why so many gold bracelets? Where did they come from? What is this conductor's life like?" — and a character in a story is born.

In high school he sat in the back row, one of those students with good grades whom teachers dislike because he won't follow the rules. He spent more time on the high school's literary club and its journal Chensheng than on class and homework. His homeroom teacher, who also taught Chinese, disliked this boy who read García Márquez, Mo Yan and Orhan Pamuk under his desk every day. "Can you feed yourself doing that?" the teacher said.

Because he and his parents rarely talked, Tian Ye got used to being the sensible child he imagined they wanted. Filling out his college applications, he guessed they would favor the sciences over the humanities, since science graduates find jobs more easily, so he picked an engineering school. His biggest act of rebellion was making Against the Voyage, and doing a six-month internship as a new-media editor at Dandu.

The job was not what he had pictured. Tian Ye joked: "Xu Zhiyuan once posted this himself: Dandu looks like a utopia but is really a Foxconn." Even so, it was still the closest thing to a utopia he had found.

By his junior year, unable to work up any enthusiasm for his own major, Tian Ye finally talked to his parents about his plans, telling them literature was the only thing he cared about, that he wanted to work in it, and that he hoped to get into Peking University's creative writing graduate program — "even if I have to work as a designer or a programmer first to live, I'll come back to this eventually." Only then did Tian Ye learn that his parents had no objection to him doing literature; they wanted their son to do what he loved. All that long carefulness, it turned out, looked more like Tian Ye fighting with himself.

Besides Against the Voyage, the Rhino Literary Society holds an anything-goes discussion every Wednesday from 7 to 10 pm. The mood lately has been heavy. Last October a student at the school jumped to their death. Someone usually lively and talkative was gone within a few minutes, and it left everyone uneasy. A few members recently started a research project on it, looking into the emptiness and helplessness in student life.

Tian Ye feels that emptiness sometimes, but his own direction is solid. "If you won't let me live truthfully, then am I not worse off than the dog at home? I might as well die," he wrote in his WeChat Moments one day, a week before this interview.

8. "Young People Are Supposed to Stir Things Up and Have Some Fun"

With a week to go before graduation, Zhang Zepeng suddenly became the most talked-about person at Beijing Forestry University.

The reason: a few of his buddies from BFU's Weiguang (Faint Light) club hung a banner and presented him with a pennant reading, "Classmate Zhang Zepeng didn't find a girlfriend in four years." To keep it going, the same friends then did more than a dozen man-on-the-street interviews around campus on how to stop being single, collected good wishes for Zhang Zepeng, and cut it all into a three-minute video.

Li Mingzhao was one of those friends. He is the third deputy president in BFU Weiguang's history, and Zhang Zepeng's successor.

BFU Weiguang was founded in 2013 by a senior in digital media, originally under the name Vlight Studio. A group of young people got together to make videos, mostly going for a flashy look, with clean, sharp editing. There is one guiding principle: "Young people are supposed to stir things up and have some fun."

They have made a number of videos that went over well on campus. One was a "Mannequin Challenge" shot with three other clubs, filming passersby frozen mid-motion as though time had stopped; another was a 65th-anniversary tribute film for BFU, cut from three years of footage three members had shot. That one got 26,000 views on Weibo, and Zhang Zepeng directed it.

Last year Didi came to BFU Weiguang and had them shoot a Christmas ad.

BFU's 65th-anniversary tribute film

Li Mingzhao likes Tim Walker, Wong Kar-wai and Quentin Tarantino, but knew nothing about shooting video before. As a freshman, on a summer field trip to Arxan in Ulanmutong, Inner Mongolia, to survey plant resources, he was still shooting on a Canon 750D. A friend along on the trip was already in BFU Weiguang, and the two cut their footage into a short video, Song of Mengdian. It later won an honorable mention at the Fifth Pan-Pacific University Student Micro-Documentary Competition, which gave Li Mingzhao real confidence.

After joining BFU Weiguang he spent 17,000 yuan of his own money moving from the Canon 750D to a 5D4. Members are usually split into four groups — narrative film, travel footage, music videos, documentary — and work project by project. Everything Li Mingzhao knows about editing, camera positions and the rest came from the people he worked with on one project or another.

With little money, shoots are usually rushed. Last year Li Mingzhao and other members shot a two-and-a-half-minute promotional film for BFU's Lüyuan Dance Club; renting a slider, lights, a body and lenses together cost 1,800 yuan a day, so they shot straight from 6 am one day to 6 am the next.

Another film that took a lot out of him was the music video Savior, which he directed for the campus band Poison Balloon. To match the collapsing world in the lyrics, Li Mingzhao put plastic animal masks on the band. One strand shows them wandering city streets; the other shows the band singing in a recording studio: "Your spaceship is parked at the far end of your dream that never broke."

Over the past year Li Mingzhao made more than a dozen films in all. If he wasn't in a classroom he was editing, and looking back none of it satisfies him — "next to Zhang Zepeng I'm still way too green."

But unlike a year ago, he has registered an account on the Xinpianchang community and has a portfolio, with three films on it he is fairly happy with. Under the name "Li Mingzhao" a small line reads: "Rising Editor."

The music video Savior, made by BFU Weiguang for the campus band Poison Balloon

9. "One Day the Cathedral Collapsed, and They Built an Even More Magnificent One"

Every Saturday and Sunday from 8 to 11 pm, Room 18, on basement level two of Dormitory Building 35 in Peking University's Yenching Garden, belongs to Chu Xiankun and his Yuanpei Underground Cinema.

It isn't big — a converted self-study room — but it has what it needs: a projector; two pale pink serpentine sofa chairs with a plush bear lying on them; posters on the wall left over from a recent Leslie Cheung screening; a stack of black folding chairs in the corner. The cinema has 23 members, who take turns on duty: whoever has the weekend picks the film, writes the post and runs the screening. In a year they have held 80 screenings.

The films screened at the underground cinema are not actually underground. There are more niche titles like The Great Buddha+ and Like Father, Like Son, and there are good commercial films the members vote for, like Kingsman and Blade Runner. Plenty of university film societies hold to the first standard — Minzu University's Fangda Film Station, Tsinghua's Film Society, BLCU's Film Society. Chu Xiankun sees it differently. A university cinema, he thinks, shouldn't only be a gathering place for film buffs; it should take more people in.

Chu Xiankun is an undergraduate on the politics, philosophy and economics track at Peking University's Yuanpei College, class of 2015. When the cinema was set up last May it was purely to satisfy the "watch 100 films" requirement of an elective, A History of World Cinema. Because Room 18 on basement level two had a projector, a few students turned it into a screening room.

The space looked cold, so they put some work into it. First they carried a dozen-plus chairs and a bookcase down from the floor above; then they bought a stack of old issues of the film magazine Kan Dianying, and posters, and covered the walls, which took three or four days and more than a dozen rolls of double-sided tape. Chu Xiankun imagined at the time that the room would be packed, so he went out near Huoying and spent about 100 yuan on a secondhand blanket, so people without a seat could sit on the floor. To make it feel warmer, another member, Qin Zhu, handed over her own big yellow plush bear, Qianqian.

The most important thing was the popcorn machine, the soul of what makes a cinema rather than a screening room. For it, Chu Xiankun and another member, He Yang, went out to Datun Road, an hour by bus from Wudaokou, and paid more than 300 yuan for a secondhand machine from a cafe. It was past 10 pm by the time they had it, so the two took a taxi back to the south gate of Yenching Garden and, giddy about it, carried the thing all the way from the gate down to the basement of Building 35.

The first film at the opening was Cinema Paradiso, for which the members popped 40 batches of popcorn. They had clearly been too hopeful: the WeChat post promoting the screening got more than 10,000 views, but only a dozen-plus people came, 10 of them cinema members. "I'm finally convinced that the number of views on a post has nothing to do with how many people turn up to watch a movie."

Chu Xiankun's love of film began at a bootleg DVD shop near his high school; Cinema Paradiso, Scent of a Woman and Farewell My Concubine all date from then. In college the place he went most was Wudaokou's Whale Screening Room, now closed, where he got to know film fans of every kind as well as people from the film societies at nearby universities.

Fewer and fewer people coming to watch is a headache for nearly every film society leader Chu Xiankun knows. There are too many ways to watch now: cloud drives, Bilibili, Tencent Video, iQiyi. Most people would rather lie in bed staring at a phone, or hunch in front of a computer with headphones on.

The young people running the Yuanpei Underground Cinema accept that. What a cinema can offer, they think, is something else: inside one shared space, an exchange between people and a film, between people and each other, and between a person and themselves. To test the idea they tried a discussion after a screening of Happy Together, and brought in a cocktail enthusiast to set the mood. At best, more than 30 people squeezed into the room.

More often the turnout can't be predicted. There are always more chairs than people, and the 100-yuan blanket has barely been used. Leslie Cheung and Wong Kar-wai might bring in 30 people, while Inside Out, which members had voted the film they most wanted to see, drew nobody at all. The one certainty is that come midterms and finals, Yuanpei College students would rather Room 18 stayed a self-study room.

But Chu Xiankun thinks none of that matters much. What matters is that a temporary public space for watching films exists at all. Next semester the cinema plans to invite Peking University teachers such as Dai Jinhua and Li Meng to talk about film, and to open the place up to more people. In an interview posted inside the club, he quoted Ingmar Bergman:

"My dream is an old legend: one day the cathedral collapsed, and craftsmen, millers, knights, peddlers, people of every kind came together there without anyone calling them, and spent a long time rebuilding an even more magnificent cathedral. Once it was built, they all left."

(Ming Zheng is a pseudonym, at the interviewee's request.)

Cover images: a still from The Chorus and a scene from Ouyang Huiyu's performance art piece; other images provided by the interviewees.