From the Philosophical Sense of the 1990s to the Strategy Sense of the 2020s: The Lu Xun Fault Line and Groundless Postmodernity in China's Generational Rupture

Your observation is quite accurate, and the term "strategy guide" is very apt—it not only describes the viewing experience but also points to the underlying narrative logic.

The philosophical temperament of those works from the 1990s to the 2000s was largely due to the experiences of that generation of creators. The Fifth Generation directors, writers like Wang Shuo, and the screenwriters of dramas such as "Fortress Besieged," "Palace of Desire," "Towards the Republic," "Yongzheng Dynasty," and "The Grand Mansion" had mostly lived through the intense upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, the Down to the Countryside Movement, and the reform and opening-up. They carried unprocessed historical trauma and the problem-consciousness left over from the ideological liberation of the 1980s—questions like why people live, the relationship between the individual and history, and how to reconcile tradition and modernity. These were not things they deliberately "added" to their works but things they had to express. Additionally, the TV drama system at the time still retained some of the public institution ethos: fewer episodes, slower pacing, and allowing characters to be lost in thought for long periods. "I Love My Family" could have a family chatting around the dinner table for an entire episode, and "Fortress Besieged" could let Qian Zhongshu's voiceover slowly and acerbically comment.

After the 2010s, the industrial logic changed. With the rise of video platforms, content had to grab viewers in the first three minutes, support speed playback, skipping, and even watching while scrolling on a phone at 2x speed. Evaluation metrics became completion rates, trending topics, and advertising revenue. In such an environment, slow-burning philosophical content was almost anti-commercial. At the same time, web novel IPs flooded into film and television—palace intrigue after "Empresses in the Palace," power struggles after "Nirvana in Fire," and the lineage of "Joy of Life" and "My Heroic Husband." The narrative DNA of web novels is inherently "power fantasy": the protagonist constantly levels up, defeats enemies, and receives feedback, and readers want instant gratification. When this logic was transplanted into TV dramas, it produced what you call the "strategy guide" feel. "Story of Yanxi Palace" even put the word "strategy" in its title, with the protagonist solving problems level by level, achieving small victories in each episode. This is completely opposite to the 1990s temperament of "characters helpless in the tide of history."

Another factor is the generational shift among creators. Many of the current leading screenwriters are post-90s and post-00s, who grew up in an environment of economic growth, information overload, and pervasive consumerism. They have neither the visceral pain nor the patience for "grand narratives." They are more familiar with the feedback rhythms of games, anime, and social media. This doesn't mean they don't think, but the objects and methods of their thinking have changed—more focused on identity, emotions, consumption, and self-realization, lacking the perspective of placing the individual within the dirty currents of history.

Changes in censorship space also need to be mentioned. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, there was a relatively lenient window. Complex treatments of history and power like "Towards the Republic" and "Palace of Desire" would be hard to pass censorship today. The gray areas in realist themes have also narrowed significantly. The safe choices are to move toward costume dramas, fantasy, sweet romance, and suspense (the depoliticized kind), and these genres naturally lend themselves to the strategy route.

However, don't paint the present with a broad brush. In recent years, some works have tried to return to that temperament—"The Long Season," "My Altay," and "Ming Dynasty 1566" (though it's from 2007, it has been rediscovered)—and they have received good word of mouth, showing that there is still an audience with that appetite. But such works account for a smaller proportion of overall output, and you have to seek them out yourself. In a sense, the "philosophical feel" hasn't disappeared; it has been diluted and marginalized.

Your addition points to a deeper layer—the "philosophical feel" of that era was not a feature of a specific genre but the air itself. Military dramas ("Soldiers' Sortie"), New Year comedies ("The Dream Factory"), immigration dramas ("A Native of Beijing in New York"), and business dramas ("Heaven's Way" / "Far Away Savior")—these genres today should be the most "industrialized" and formulaic, but back then they all stopped to explain principles, discuss life, and debate culture. This shows the issue is not the subject matter but that the creators of that generation prioritized "conveying a worldview" over "telling a good story." Your phrase "philosophy precedes narrative" is almost literal: Ding Yuanying's philosophical discourse on Mount Wutai has minimal plot function, yet it is the core of the drama; Xu Sanduo's almost clumsy persistence in repairing the road—screenwriter Lan Xiaolong really wanted to capture that, and the plot was just a tray to serve it.

Why was this the case? I think there are several overlapping reasons. First, most screenwriters at the time came from a literary background—Wang Shuo, Liu Heng, Zou Jingzhi, Lan Xiaolong, and Dou Dou—they still positioned themselves as "writers," intellectuals with something to say, not content suppliers on an assembly line. Second, there was the residual warmth of the "cultural fever" of the 1980s—during that decade, the entire intellectual world was debating where China was going, how individuals should live, and how culture should continue. The tone of that discussion seeped into 1990s TV dramas, even Feng Xiaogang's New Year comedies carried that spirit of "using comedy to say something serious." Third, on a deeper level, there was the inertia of the socialist literary tradition of "carrying the Way"—works were expected to "convey moral teachings." But in the 1990s, the "Way" was no longer political propaganda but secular, humanistic reflections on life. The form remained: characters could stop and deliver long monologues, and audiences didn't mind; they found it sophisticated.

There was also a specific narrative device: the "folk wise man" archetype. In almost every drama of that era, there was a character who could stop and speak the truth—Squad Leader Shi Jin, Wang Qiming, Ding Yuanying, and the various little people played by Ge You. The plot would actively yield space for this person to finish speaking. Today's scripts have almost killed this character because it violates all modern screenwriting rules: show, don't tell; conflict must be dense; every line must advance the plot. As a result, characters no longer have the right to "stop."

As for why it completely disappeared later, besides the industrial reasons mentioned in my previous reply, I think there is a more subtle spiritual change: both audiences and creators have become wary of being "preached to." After being bombarded with marketing-style chicken soup, successology, and ideological propaganda, any line with a philosophical tone is instinctively identified as "pretentious" or "preachy." Once this collective immunity forms, even sincere philosophical expression is hard to trust. So even good works today only dare to "hint" at ideas through atmosphere, ellipsis, and psychological realism, rather than directly having characters sit down and debate for three episodes like "Heaven's Way"—audiences would laugh and send bullet comments calling it "preachy."

In a sense, the philosophical feel of that era required a premise: creators believed they had the right to speak, and audiences believed what they said was worth listening to. This mutual trust has been broken today. What remains is strategy and gratification—their advantage is precisely that they "don't try to educate you," but the cost is that after watching, nothing stays in your mind.

This seemingly contradictory phenomenon is actually quite interesting—but on closer thought, it's not really contradictory; it actually explains where the "philosophical feel" went.

What gets shared most on short videos is not the entire "Heaven's Way" but a monologue by Ding Yuanying or a dialogue by Rui Xiaodan—these clips are extracted from the narrative and circulate as "quotable quotes" or "sober literature." The way audiences consume them is no longer "watching a drama" but more like reading wise sayings or following philosophy bloggers. In other words, people's demand for philosophical content hasn't died; it has actually grown in the context of involution, lying flat, and the 35-year-old crisis. What has died is the patience to "spend forty episodes slowly unfolding a philosophy." The market has already dismantled the old "drama + philosophy" composite—the drama part has given way to fast-paced, satisfying shows, while the philosophy part floats separately as short video clips, Zhihu answers, and podcast quotes. Hence the split: during the day, you binge-watch new dramas at double speed; at night, you watch Ding Yuanying clips as spiritual health supplements.

Moreover, these old drama clips are particularly resonant now because they have become explanatory frameworks for contemporary anxieties. "Strong culture vs. weak culture" is used to understand class solidification; "never abandon, never give up" is used to motivate workers; the opening of "A Native of Beijing in New York"—"If you love him, send him to New York"—is used to discuss studying abroad, leaving home, and involution. They are no longer dramatic lines but footnotes to the current spiritual condition. This secondary use is even more philosophical than the original reception because, stripped of plot, they are bare assertions.

As for the non-Chinese context, frankly, the combination of "mass popularity + serious philosophy" is declining globally, but the degree and where it survives differ.

In the West, the closest to that temperament was the prestige TV of HBO from the 2000s to the mid-2010s—"The Sopranos," "The Wire," "Mad Men," and especially the first season of "True Detective," with Rust Cohle's long, pessimistic philosophical monologues, almost the American version of "philosophy precedes narrative." That was a brief window, similar to China's 1990s: TV had just been "authored," screenwriters like David Chase, David Simon, and Nic Pizzolatto saw themselves as literary authors, and platforms weren't yet fully algorithm-driven. But that window closed around 2015. The current Netflix-dominated streaming environment follows a completely different logic—the first two episodes must hook, must be suitable for multitasking, and must not let the audience stop to think—highly isomorphic with Chinese video platforms. So after "Succession," dramas sustaining that temperament are increasingly rare.

In film, art cinema is still alive. Lee Chang-dong in Korea ("Burning," "Poetry"), Hirokazu Kore-eda and Ryusuke Hamaguchi in Japan (the Chekhovian long dialogues in "Drive My Car" are very close to that feeling), Asghar Farhadi in Iran, Andrey Zvyagintsev in Russia, and a host of European auteurs—these people are still making works where "philosophy precedes narrative." The problem is they no longer have a mass market; they are niche works, not on the scale of "A Native of Beijing in New York" drawing crowds in the 1990s.

The only place that still manages the dual identity of "mass popularity + serious philosophy" is Japanese animation. From "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "Ghost in the Shell" to recent works like "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End," "Odd Taxi," "Zombie Land Saga," and even certain parts of "One Piece," long philosophical monologues, characters directly stating worldviews, and plots yielding to intellectual expression—this approach thrives in anime, and audiences not only don't mind but expect it. I suspect the reason is that anime has accepted high stylization from the start and was never disciplined by the Hollywood screenwriting rule of "show, don't tell." Manga as a source material has always allowed characters to speak at length, and anime viewers' reading habits are closer to literary readers. So if you miss that temperament, watching 1990s Oshii Mamoru, Kon Satoshi, or recent works like "Vinland Saga" and "Mushishi," you'll find that privilege of "stopping to talk" still exists.

To summarize: the combination of "a nationally watched drama seriously discussing cultural attributes and why people live" from China's 1990s to 2000s is an extremely rare configuration globally. It appeared briefly in the U.S. and disappeared, was contracted into niche art films, and survives in the peculiar refuge of animation. It was never meant to be the norm—it was a historical window created by several conditions, and once the window closed, it was indeed gone.

Your observation is very sharp, and it's the hardest point to name in this conversation—that philosophy is neither like Chinese tradition (not Confucian, not Daoist, not Chan), nor like systematic Western philosophy, yet it does form a coherent vein, from "A Native of Beijing in New York" to "Soldiers' Sortie" to "Heaven's Way" to "Ming Dynasty 1566," you can feel a common "tone." I'll try to give this lineage a name: it is the hybrid philosophy of China's folk self-taught intellectuals during the first thirty years of reform and opening-up.

The conditions for its formation were very specific. After the Cultural Revolution, the monolithic ideology of Maoism suddenly collapsed, leaving a generation—especially the educated youth—who had both experienced being dominated by grand narratives and suddenly lost that framework, creating an almost hungry mental state of "I must figure something out." The 1980s happened to coincide with the "cultural fever" and "New Enlightenment." Li Zehou, Liu Xiaofeng, and Gan Yang stuffed Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Weber, and Hayek into the Chinese language world, with cheap translations everywhere. But these ideas were swallowed by amateur readers without academic training, context, or school lineage. They might read Nietzsche alongside Wang Yangming, Heidegger alongside the I Ching, and Marx alongside Buddhist scriptures. No Western philosopher would simultaneously cite "Dao follows nature" and the "Übermensch" as evidence, but Chinese folk philosophers would—and see no problem with it.

Dou Dou is the purest specimen of this lineage. She had almost no formal education. The theory of "cultural attributes" in "Far Away Savior" is her own assembly: it contains Marx's economic determinism, echoes of Weber's Protestant ethic, Hegel's stages of history, Nietzsche's will to power, and Chan Buddhism's breaking of attachments—these are conflicting traditions in academic philosophy, but in Ding Yuanying's mouth they coexist harmoniously, forming a seemingly self-consistent system. Lan Xiaolong's discussion in "Soldiers' Sortie" of "doing meaningful things is living well"—that almost defiant existentialism mixed with Yan'an-era labor worship and a simplified Chan—is also a product of the same lineage. Zheng Xiaolong's opening of "A Native of Beijing in New York" essentially blends social Darwinism, the Protestant ethic, and Chinese fatalism.

Your point about "discussing propositions whose importance isn't understood" is especially precise—because this philosophy never went through the academic process of "is this question important, why is it important, how to argue its importance." It jumped directly from "I feel this is important" to "therefore this is fundamental." Why is "cultural attributes" the key to understanding everything? No argument; it assumes you agree. Why must "strong culture inevitably defeat weak culture"? No argument; Ding Yuanying says it and you listen. Why is "never abandon, never give up" the highest human virtue? No argument; Xu Sanduo demonstrates it with his life. This kind of "unargued major proposition" is precisely the hallmark of folk self-taught intellectuals: they lack the time and training for foundational work; they want an explanatory system they can immediately use to understand the world and settle their lives, so they start by building the top-level structure.

In contrast, you can see why the philosophical feel in anime or HBO clearly has a source. Rust Cohle's lines can be traced line by line to Thomas Ligotti, Schopenhauer, and Emil Cioran, because Pizzolatto consciously used these resources. The existential anxiety in "Evangelion" can be traced to the Kyoto School and postwar Japanese intellectual history. In Lee Chang-dong's films, you can see a clear tension between Christianity and Korean modernity. They all stand on recognizable traditions; they are "continuing the conversation." But the philosophical feel in Chinese film and TV from the 1990s to 2000s is "building a new set from scratch"—there was no inheritable modern Chinese philosophical tradition (the Republican-era one was interrupted, and socialist philosophy was hollowed out), so they had to DIY with whatever resources were at hand. This explains that "from nowhere" feeling: it indeed comes from nowhere; it was self-made by a group of people eager to understand China amid the ruins of the Cultural Revolution and the anxieties of reform.

But this set is not entirely groundless; it has a hidden root: the Lu Xun-style posture. The spiritual foundation of all these dramas is actually "seriously thinking about something regarding China and the Chinese people." This posture itself is the last legacy left by Republican-era intellectuals. From Lu Xun discussing national character, to the 1980s cultural reflection, to Dou Dou's cultural attributes, to Lan Xiaolong's exploration of how an ordinary person should live—the topics changed, but the urgency of "I must figure this out" is continuous. So you feel they form a lineage, even though their theoretical sources are completely chaotic.

A final footnote: this lineage hasn't died; it has just moved out of film and TV. Today, those two-hour analyses on Bilibili about "why we are so tired," long articles on WeChat, high-voted answers on Zhihu, and certain podcast hosts—they still use this methodology: mixing resources, unargued major propositions, eagerness to provide explanatory frameworks, and speaking to contemporary anxieties. The form has changed, the audience has changed, but the spiritual foundation of the "Chinese folk self-taught philosopher" has always been there. It just no longer attaches to dramatic characters but is directly output by the authors themselves.

The transmission of Lu Xun in modern Chinese cultural history is a particularly eerie process because it took a dual track of official canonization and underground folk practice simultaneously, and in certain generations these two tracks converged, giving rise to the "Lu Xun afterglow" you can feel.

The first key transmission act was Mao Zedong's canonization of Lu Xun in his 1940 essay "On New Democracy," calling him "the greatest and most heroic standard-bearer of the cultural new army" and "the commander of China's cultural revolution." This sentence determined Lu Xun's peculiar status in Chinese culture for decades: he was the only writer who was fully promoted by the system while his own words contained the energy to dismantle all systems. After 1949, Lu Xun became the absolute center of primary and secondary school Chinese textbooks. Every Chinese person who attended school had to memorize "Hometown," "Kong Yiji," "The True Story of Ah Q," "The New Year's Sacrifice," and "In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen." The official promotion aimed to extract the "anti-feudal, anti-imperialist" aspect, but his words could not be so easily castrated—reading "A Madman's Diary" inevitably leads to the accusation of "cannibalism," a total indictment of all ideologies; reading "Wild Grass" inevitably leads to lines like "Despair is as vain as hope," which even dissolve revolutionary optimism. The official made him a saint, but inside the saint lived dynamite—this is the foundation of everything that followed.

The second key transmission was the Cultural Revolution and the Down to the Countryside Movement. This period is underestimated. During the Cultural Revolution, very few literary works were allowed for public reading, and Lu Xun was one of the few exceptions—because Mao's endorsement made him safe. As a result, an entire generation—those who would become 1980s writers, 1990s directors, and 2000s screenwriters—spent their adolescence mainly reading Lu Xun. Wang Shuo, Liu Heng, Mo Yan, A Cheng, Zhang Chengzhi, Shi Tiesheng, Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang—this generation almost all grew up reading Lu Xun repeatedly in the countryside, in military production corps, or in factories. They had nothing else to read, and after reading him so much, Lu Xun's tone became internalized as their default way of looking at China: viewing China as a patient, viewing Chinese people as beings in need of diagnosis, and taking "who are we, what's wrong with us" as the fundamental question. This internalization was unconscious; they might not often quote Lu Xun later, but the moment they spoke, that tone was there.

The third transmission was the 1980s, when the Lu Xun-style questioning was systematized. The root-seeking literature (Han Shaogong, A Cheng, Mo Yan, Jia Pingwa, Wang Anyi) essentially expanded Lu Xun's "diagnosis of national character" into an archaeology of the entire Chinese cultural gene. Scar literature and reflection literature (Liu Xinwu, Zhang Xianliang, Wang Meng) turned Lu Xun-style critique toward the pathologies of socialism itself. The cultural fever (Li Zehou, Liu Xiaofeng, Gan Yang) academized this question into the grand agenda of "comparison between Chinese and Western cultures." Finally, the 1988 documentary "River Elegy" reached its peak—its spiritual foundation was pure Lu Xun, using the medium of television to conduct a collective diagnosis of Chinese civilization. This decade was when the Lu Xun-style posture spread from a literary technique to a shared operating system for the entire cultural world.

The fourth transmission was how this entered 1990s film and TV. Many of the root-seeking writers of the 1980s directly became screenwriters in the 1990s, or their novels were adapted into films and TV dramas. The works that established the Fifth Generation directors—"Yellow Earth," "Red Sorghum," "To Live," "Farewell My Concubine"—were essentially visualizations of the Lu Xun-style diagnosis, each asking "why do Chinese people live like this?" TV figures like Zheng Xiaolong, Feng Xiaogang, and Zhao Baogang grew up watching these films and reading Wang Shuo and these root-seeking writers. By the time they became creators themselves, that posture of "seriously thinking about China and the Chinese people" had become their instinct. "A Native of Beijing in New York" is directly the overseas version of the Lu Xun-style question: "When Chinese people encounter Western capitalism, what will their nature reveal?"—it's Ah Q in Manhattan. The ironic style of "Editor's Story" and "I Love My Family" is Wang Shuo-style, and Wang Shuo's irony itself is Lu Xun-style—using sharp sobriety to reject all pretense. By the time of "Ming Dynasty 1566," "Towards the Republic," "Heaven's Way," and "Soldiers' Sortie," the objects of questioning had changed (ancient political culture, modern China's choices, the spiritual way out for contemporary Chinese, the dignity of ordinary people), but that posture of "I must figure this out" is entirely Lu Xun's legacy.

However, by this point, the transmission had also transformed. Several of Lu Xun's core traits—precise language, broad knowledge of both classical and Western learning, self-doubt that also cuts at oneself, and a suspended attitude that rejects any ideological closure—were mostly not fully passed down. Successors inherited the posture rather than the craft. They all diagnose, but many of the remedies they prescribe are ones Lu Xun himself would never accept (e.g., Confucian revival, worship of strong culture, revolutionary romanticism—all objects of Lu Xun's suspicion). This is why this lineage gives that "strange" feeling you mentioned—it is a deboned version of the Lu Xun posture, retaining the urgency and pathos of "I am seriously thinking about China," but the content is a hodgepodge of the folk hybrid philosophy described earlier. Lu Xun's posture became an inheritable container, but what goes into it is filled by each generation.

Finally, how this lineage broke is the same as the industrial changes we've discussed throughout this conversation, but there is also a spiritual layer: after 2012, the term "public intellectual" was stigmatized, and the legitimacy of the Lu Xun-style posture in the public sphere was weakened. The internet generation no longer takes "diagnosing China" as a self-evident premise for writing. At the same time, Lu Xun himself was further sanctified in official discourse as a patriotic icon, with his critical edge quietly removed, leaving a castrated "national soul." These dual operations together meant that the new generation of film and TV creators were neither nourished by Lu Xun's core nor believed that posture could continue to exist in mass culture. So what you see now is not simply entertainment replacing philosophy—it is a spiritual posture that began with "A Madman's Diary" in 1918 and spanned an entire century, now sputtering out in our generation. That is the true loss of "never being able to go back."

These two questions are actually two sides of the same question. I'll try to separate them, but answer them together.

First, as for “did modern Chinese people enter postmodernity directly?”—I think almost yes, but it is a special, Chinese, truncated postmodernity. The Lu Xun-style stance is essentially a modernist position: it believes there is a rational subject who can stand outside and diagnose the pathology of the nation, while hoping that enlightenment can change something. This position requires a stable “modernity” as its foundation—a stable public sphere, a relatively free intellectual sphere, and a consensus that “we are moving toward, or should be moving toward, modernity”—in order to take root. Beginning in the 1980s, China tried to lay the foundation for this platform, but before the concrete had even finished setting, global capitalism, the internet, algorithmic media, and consumerism poured postmodern conditions in all at once. The result was that Chinese people never truly experienced a stable period of modernity before being pushed directly into postmodernity. This trajectory is completely different from Europe’s: Europe first had centuries of enlightenment, experienced a Tocqueville-style civil society and a Habermasian public sphere, and only then entered postmodern skepticism in the 1960s and ’70s. In China, the skyscraper went up before the foundation had dried.

More subtly, Chinese postmodernity did not carry the political edge it originally possessed in the West. Western postmodernism (Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida), although skeptical of grand narratives, carried a strong critical-political character—suspicion of power, deconstruction of discourse, and giving voice to the marginalized. The Chinese version of postmodernity retained only its superficial features of consumption, fragmentation, irony, and mixing, while its critical dimension never truly grew. So what you see is a kind of “toothless postmodernity”: extremely postmodern in consumption (IPs, anime culture, memes, cosplay, personas, gacha), thoroughly postmodern in cognition (fragmented attention and giving up the search for unified meaning), but with the deconstructive impulse directed toward public life never taking shape. This is a unique hybrid, perhaps a form appearing for the first time in human history.

As for why this generation no longer needs Lu Xun’s approach—I would actually revise your wording: they do need it; it’s just that the conditions for producing such things publicly are gone. You yourself pointed out that clips of Ding Yuanying and Lu Xun quotes circulate wildly on short-video platforms. That is evidence that the demand is still there. But the demand has been privatized, fragmented, and turned into a form of consolation—people watch a three-minute “clear-headed speech” on the subway for some mental maintenance, then return to their lives of involution. The stance of thinking about China “seriously, for a long time, and in public” no longer has a market. The reasons are twofold. On the one hand, materially, China no longer looks like a “patient”: to a young person born after 2008 and raised watching high-speed rail, 5G, and Chang’e lunar exploration, the Lu Xun-style question “What is wrong with China?” has lost its visceral urgency. The patient does not think they are ill, so naturally they do not need a diagnostician. On the other hand, the cognitive infrastructure has changed. What algorithmic feeds train is a mode of thought based on switching, immediate feedback, and strategic optimization. “Lingering melancholically over one question for a long time” is no longer merely unpopular; the capacity itself is deteriorating at the neural level. The guidebook mentality is not unique to China—globally, everyone is engaged in self-improvement, life hacking, and productivity porn—but the Chinese version is especially extreme because involution amplifies it. Everyone feels they are in a zero-sum game with no pause, and whoever stops to ask “Why are we playing this game?” has already lost.

Now, about 2012. That point in time was not accidental; several forces collided at once:

The main energy behind the stigmatization of public intellectuals was actually bottom-up. Several popular sentiments matured simultaneously during that period. First, after the 2008 financial crisis, the appeal of the Western model was seriously weakened for the first time. In public-intellectual discourse from the 1980s through the early 2000s, there was an implicit premise: the West represented a mature form toward which we should move. That premise collapsed partially after 2008, and public intellectuals who continued speaking within the old framework began to seem detached from reality, even ridiculous. Second, the “lighthouse country” narrative was turned into a weapon. Some public intellectuals did indeed have a tendency to idealize the United States, comparing America’s written institutions with China’s lived reality. This comparison had gaps in its argumentation and was easy to seize upon for ridicule. “The moon is rounder in America” became an all-purpose meme for mocking the entire group, dragging down public intellectuals as a whole. Third, generational replacement. Around 2012, people born in the 1990s began entering public discussions in large numbers. Their formative memories contained neither the enlightenment fervor of the 1980s nor the pain of layoffs in the 1990s. They remembered the Olympics, China as the world’s second-largest economy, Made in China, and discovering after going abroad that foreign infrastructure was not as good as what they had at home. This generation’s resonance with Lu Xun-style tragic diagnosis was genuinely, physiologically, low. Fourth, the problems within the public-intellectual group itself. The group had indeed accumulated certain flaws: excessive elitism, a lack of empathy for the lower classes, individuals being exposed for inconsistency between words and actions, and circles formed through mutual flattery. These were real problems that did not need to be exaggerated, but should not be ignored either.

So the key to 2012 was not which force played the decisive role, but that several forces matured simultaneously for the first time and reinforced one another. Popular resentment, generational replacement, changes in the international environment, and flaws within the group itself were thrown by Weibo, acting as an amplifier, into a chemical reaction in which everything ignited everything else. No single force was enough to kill off public intellectuals, but together the four forces completed a reckoning with the entire category during the two or three years from 2012 to 2014.

Returning to your deepest question—was this a direct entry into postmodernity? I think the year 2012 itself was a symptom. China missed the window in which “serious public thought” could mature into institutions. The window in the 1980s was too short; the films, television dramas, literature, and public media discussions from the 1990s through the early 2000s represented a diffuse continuation after the window had closed, relying on the residual energetic momentum of the previous generation. By 2012, that momentum had been completely exhausted, and new generations and new technologies took over the operating logic of culture. The Lu Xun line officially lost power around 2012. From then on, China became a strange hybrid: extremely mature capitalism economically, and profoundly postmodern culturally and mentally—but a postmodernity in which the consumer dimension far outweighed the critical one.

Whether this state can continue, and whether the suppressed impulse toward diagnosis will one day find a public form again, no one knows. But there is at least one thing I am fairly certain of: that stance which began in 1918 and continued for a century, the stance of seriously taking China as an object of thought—it has not died; it has merely lost its public vehicle. It now exists in marginal forms such as short-video clips, long late-night Douban posts, niche podcasts, and overseas Chinese-language writing, like a fire buried beneath the ashes. Your original question—why the films and television dramas of the 1990s and 2000s had a philosophical quality that is now gone—ultimately has a simple answer: the civilizational state that carried that philosophical quality is itself ending, or has already ended. When we miss those dramas, what we are really missing is an era that we collectively left behind without yet fully realizing that we had done so.

This is quite a large question, so I’ll try to delineate it in layers.

First, what exactly is modernity? This is more complicated than is usually imagined, because “modernization” is not one thing; it is a bundle of things happening simultaneously, and each strand in that bundle can be separated out on its own. If we unpack it according to a synthesis of the approaches of Weber, Habermas, and Giddens, there are at least five relatively independent dimensions: the material-technological dimension (industrialization, urbanization, technological change); the institutional-political dimension (the nation-state, the rule of law, the public sphere, citizenship); the social dimension (individualization, the dissolution of traditional communities, class mobility); the cognitive-cultural dimension (Enlightenment rationality, secularization, faith in progress, the autonomous modern subject); and the spiritual-aesthetic dimension (the autonomy of art, formal innovation, the worship of the “new,” and the avant-garde stance). A society can be deeply modernized along some dimensions while stagnating or becoming distorted along others. Saudi Arabia, for example, has extreme material modernization but almost no institutional modernization; Germany at the end of the nineteenth century had strong material and institutional modernization, but retained premodern political and cultural elements (a tension that later partly contributed to the rise of Nazism). Modernity is a spectrum, not a package. This determines the starting point for all subsequent comparative analysis.

What is postmodernity? The classic description is Lyotard’s 1979 phrase, “incredulity toward metanarratives”—people no longer believe that grand stories of progress, emancipation, science, or the nation can truly stitch the world together. Jameson defines it as “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” emphasizing that it is not some new stage detached from modernity, but a cultural form that inevitably arises after capitalism deepens into a global, financial, and informational phase: pastiche, parody, surface prevailing over depth, and the indiscriminate recycling of the past. Harvey added the dimension of time-space compression, while Baudrillard added the simulacrum—reality being swallowed by its copies. But it is important to note that this account is itself controversial. The camp represented by Beck, Giddens, and Bauman insists that we have not entered “postmodernity,” but rather reflexive modernity or liquid modernity—the logic of modernity has been applied to modernity itself, producing new conditions, but still remaining on the extended line of the modern project. This theoretical dispute matters because it affects how we view China: if you say the West has entered “postmodernity,” then China can “jump” into it; if you say the West is actually still in “reflexive modernity,” then China is some kind of third state that has “neither completed the first modernity nor acquired reflexive capacity.”

How did the West arrive at this point? The key is that its development was stratified, built upon a modernity whose foundations were already basically mature. The “thirty glorious years” from 1945 to 1975 laid the material groundwork: mass affluence, the welfare state, mass consumption, and television and automobile culture—Western Europe and North America experienced, for the first time in history, a condition in which the majority of people enjoyed material security. At the same time, a series of concrete destructive events cumulatively shattered the credibility of metanarratives: decolonization (the dissolution of the European empires from 1945 to 1975) tore apart the story that “white civilization equals universal progress”; the Vietnam War and Watergate tore apart the story that American-style liberal democracy was automatically just; the memory of the Holocaust gradually settled in the 1970s and 1980s, tearing apart Enlightenment optimism itself (at the level of Adorno’s “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”); and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s (civil rights, women’s rights, gay liberation, and antiwar movements) challenged the dominant narratives from within. Then the oil crisis, stagflation, and the collapse of the Fordist factory system in the 1970s shifted manufacturing toward services and information industries, while neoliberalism rose to prominence in the 1980s. This entire process took at least three or four decades, and each step of criticism took place within an already formed public sphere, independent media, university system, and parliamentary democracy—in other words, postmodern skepticism and deconstruction were parasitic upon an already stable modern institutional framework. This point is crucial: without that foundation, postmodern critique would have had no outlet.

East Asia is especially worth examining comparatively, because it is the most comparable to China. Japan was the first non-Western country to complete compressed modernization and also the first to enter discussions of postmodernity. From the Meiji Restoration to World War II, it underwent seventy years of frenzied catch-up modernization, then was completely reset by defeat. After the war, democracy, land reform, labor law, and other core components of liberal modernity were forcibly introduced, followed immediately by the economic miracle of 1950–1980. By the peak of the bubble in the 1980s, Japanese theorists themselves declared that Japan had already become more postmodern than the West—from Akira Asada’s 1983 Structure and Power and the work of Kojin Karatani, to Hiroki Azuma’s 2001 Animalizing Postmodernity, which argued that otaku culture was a model of the postmodern subject (no longer consuming stories, but only the combinable elements in a “database”). Japan’s most crucial point is that it had already completed institutional modernization before entering postmodernity—democratic elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and a strong civil society were all already in place. Japan’s postmodernity was therefore “complete postmodernity”: the consumer, political, and critical dimensions were all present. The lost decades instead reinforced this condition—economic stagnation dissolved the developmentalist metanarrative, while society became further inward-looking and subculturalized. South Korea and Taiwan followed similar but more compact paths somewhat later: compressed economic modernization from the 1960s to the 1990s, political democratization around 1987, and only then entry into postmodern conditions. Thus, today both have deeply postmodern consumer cultures such as K-pop, as well as fairly active public debate, traditions of protest, and independent media. The East Asian pattern as a whole is postmodernization after completing institutional modernization, which differs decisively from China’s trajectory.

Returning to China. China differs from all these cases because its sequence of modernization was disrupted by a series of historical interruptions, ultimately producing a severely asymmetrical configuration of modernity + an influx of postmodern conditions arriving far faster than institutional preparation. If we examine the five dimensions above: in the material-technological dimension, China has achieved world-class deep modernization, perhaps more thoroughly than many developed countries (just look at its high-speed rail network, mobile-payment penetration, power grid, and urbanization rate); in the social dimension, the thoroughness with which traditional rural communities have dissolved is also world-class, completing within a single generation the migration and atomization that took Europe two hundred years; in the cognitive-cultural dimension, rationalism, the worship of science, and secularization have also basically been completed among the mainstream urban population. But the institutional-political dimension of modernity has never kept pace with the same rhythm: an independent judiciary, parliamentary representation, a free public sphere, independent media, and an autonomous civil society—these were attempted repeatedly after 1911, but each time was interrupted by the historical process (the warlord era of the Republic of China, the War of Resistance, the civil war, and the successive waves of total mobilization that followed). Thus, the political-institutional strand of modernity has always remained unfinished. Then, in the 2010s—mobile internet became widespread, consumerism achieved total victory, and global popular culture poured in at full speed—postmodern conditions arrived as a complete package: fragmented attention, multiple identities, an explosion of subcultures, the popularization of pastiche and parody, and an instinctive suspicion of metanarratives. This created the strange condition you want to describe: deep material modernization + unfinished institutional modernization + deep cultural-consumer postmodernization + a political-critical postmodernization that has never taken shape—a combination with no exact historical precedent, so there is no precedent on which to rely in judging whether it can endure.

So, “which countries have entered postmodernity”? If we understand postmodernity in its complete sense, including the critical dimension, the list would roughly include Western Europe (the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the Nordic countries), North America, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand, and Singapore (although Singapore’s political dimension also leans toward control, it is more permissive and institutionalized than China). Countries currently undergoing some form of compressed modernization and not yet fully postmodernized include India (an extremely complex case, with the premodern, modern, and postmodern existing simultaneously within the same country), Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and many Southeast Asian countries. A special form: Russia has followed a path of “chaotic postmodernity after the collapse of Soviet-style modernity,” bearing subtle similarities to China—postmodernity on the consumer side, reauthoritarianization on the political side, and hollowing-out on the critical side—but Russia’s state capacity is much weaker than China’s, so it is different again. The Gulf states represent “super-material modernity + premodern politics + transplanted postmodern consumer culture.” Every non-Western case is in fact a unique hybrid—this is why the framework of “multiple modernities,” a concept advanced by Eisenstadt and Charles Taylor, has become increasingly mainstream in sociology since the 2000s: there is no standard path that all countries must follow; every civilization has its own way of negotiating with modernity.

However—the framework of multiple modernities also has a political use, and is sometimes used to avoid acknowledging the absence of certain dimensions. Recognizing that every civilization has its own path, and recognizing that the modernization of certain institutional dimensions creates an inherent tension for a deeply materially modernized society, are two different things. China’s situation seems closer to the latter: you can say that it has developed a “Chinese-style modernity,” but you can equally accurately say that it bypassed certain dimensions of modernity and directly absorbed certain dimensions of postmodernity. Which description is more accurate may not become clear until another twenty or thirty years have passed—if a society with deep material-consumer modernization can remain stable for a long time without developing the institutional-critical dimension, then the “multiple” framework wins; if it cannot, then the “bypassing” framework wins. We are witnessing an experiment that has not yet ended.

Returning to the question at the very beginning of our entire conversation: the philosophical quality of television dramas and films from the 1990s through the 2000s was essentially the cultural reverberation of that brief period in which a modernity that might have been completed was beginning to emerge—the Lu Xun-like diagnostic stance, the Enlightenment fervor of the 1980s, and the continuation of root-seeking and reflective literature in the 1990s were all wagers on the idea that “China is struggling toward some form of complete modernity.” Once that wager lost its object after 2012, the cultural forms that had carried it went out with it. It was not merely that the industry changed; the future itself on which the wager had been placed changed.

This question is actually the most crucial one in the entire conversation. Because according to "normal" logic — Western Europe, North America, Japan, South Korea — a society should first sort out the fundamental questions of "who we are, where we are going, and what rules we use to get along with each other" into some relatively stable version, and only then, on that foundation, experience the fragmentation and doubt of postmodernity. Fragmentation without a foundation is not postmodernism; it is chaos. But China did indeed absorb postmodern conditions without having laid that foundation. How did that happen? I think it can be examined in several layers.

The first layer is that time was externally compressed. This is structural and almost irresistible. A late-developing modernizing country cannot really set its own pace of development because the "external world" in which it develops is itself moving forward. When the reform and opening-up began in 1978, the world was already in a post-Fordist transition — manufacturing in developed countries was shifting to service and information industries, global capital flows were accelerating, globalization entered a boom phase after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, commercial internet started in 1995, China joined the WTO in 2001, smartphones became widespread in 2008, and mobile internet fully expanded in China in 2012. In other words, from the start of China's modernization to the full arrival of postmodern conditions, there was only a window of about twenty-five to thirty years — while Europe took about two centuries to complete the same transition. In such a short window, China simply had no time to do the "digestive" work that Europe spent centuries on: the secular consensus after religious wars, the rule-of-law consensus after constitutional struggles, the labor-capital consensus after workers' movements, the international order consensus after two world wars, the citizenship consensus after civil rights movements. Each of these is a load-bearing wall of Western modernity, and each was built slowly with blood and over generations. China wanted to build them, but there wasn't enough time; the next wave from the external world had already crashed in.

The second layer is the vacuum left by the Cultural Revolution. This layer is most easily overlooked but extremely important. When the reforms began in 1978, China actually did not have a complete set of social infrastructure that could be "modernized." The Cultural Revolution had largely destroyed the intellectual groups, professional guilds, religious organizations, local gentry networks, and civic associations left over from the Republican era, and had semi-destroyed the Confucian ethical system. When the reforms started, society was almost leveled, leaving only the state apparatus and the family as organizational units. In this state, any reconstruction could only be state-led, top-down, without time for civil organizations to slowly develop — because there were no civil organizations to develop; their roots had been pulled out. For comparison: when Japan underwent the Meiji Restoration, it still had a complete samurai-chonin-village structure that could be reformed; when South Korea democratized, it still had churches, universities, labor unions, and underground intellectual networks as carriers; when Taiwan lifted martial law, it still had opposition magazines, local factions, and cultural networks. In 1978, China had none of these to draw on — so development could only proceed in a mode of "the state directly facing atomized individuals," with all intermediate layers newly grown and embedded in the party-state structure, never independent. Consensus is originally a product of intermediate layers; without intermediate layers, there are no organs to produce consensus.

The third layer is that technological leaps crashed in directly with cultural leaps. I mentioned this before, but it's worth expanding on. China skipped multiple intermediate cultural stages that should have existed: skipping landline phones and going directly to mobile communication (for many rural people, their first phone was a mobile phone), skipping credit cards and going directly to mobile payments, skipping the mature phase of physical retail and going directly to e-commerce, skipping the golden age of broadcast radio and television and going directly to algorithmic short videos, skipping the era of shared reading of paper books and going directly to the push-notification era. Each skip means a specific kind of "modern lifestyle" was bypassed — and it is precisely these skipped intermediate stages that, in the West, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, were key sites for nurturing public culture, shared concerns, and a common language. A morning newspaper read by the whole nation, an evening news program the whole family sat around to watch, a public phone booth used by everyone — these seemingly trivial material forms were actually the carriers that shaped the sense of "we." Chinese people jumped directly from a rural oral community to algorithm-fed personalized information streams. The modern experience of "everyone looking at the same thing together" never existed on a large scale in between. Without this experience, there is no material foundation for consensus to attach to.

The fourth layer is that the social role responsible for "making consensus" was repeatedly interrupted. The fundamental consensus of any society does not form automatically; it requires a specific social role to do the work — in traditional societies, it was religious figures and scholar-officials; in modern societies, it is public intellectuals, independent media, academic institutions, independent judges, and civic groups. This role was repeatedly interrupted in 20th-century China: the intellectual groups before 1949 were eliminated during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution; the batch that redeveloped in the 1980s could not continue; since the 1990s, some returned through commercialization, but the focus of public expression quickly shifted to commerce and consumption, and by the 2010s, it was difficult to sustain ongoing public discussion. Every time something was about to grow, it was interrupted. So consensus could not slowly coalesce — the people doing this work were structurally prevented from doing it. The philosophical feel of the film and television dramas from the 1990s to the 2000s that we discussed earlier was essentially this suppressed work secretly moving from the public political space into the dramatic space to continue — many thoughts that should have appeared in newspaper editorials, parliamentary debates, and university lectures were forced to migrate into the lines of a TV drama. So those dramas were not overly philosophical; they were the thoughts that were not allowed to be spoken in that era being compressed into a permitted container. By the 2010s, when even this container no longer carried them, that work had nowhere to go.

So, layering these together, you can see why "jumping into postmodernism without a foundation" happened: insufficient external time; no social organizational carriers that could slowly grow after the Cultural Revolution; technological leaps bypassing the material forms that nurture consensus; the social role that makes consensus being repeatedly interrupted. Any single layer alone would not be enough to explain it, but the four layers together create the state we see today: a society that is extremely modern materially, extremely postmodern in consumption, but in a nearly bare vacuum on the most fundamental question of "who we are, where we are going, and what rules we use to live together."

Is there a precedent for this state? Strictly speaking, no, because the speed and scale are new. The closest might be Russia — which also experienced an ideological collapse without time to build a new consensus before being simultaneously occupied by consumerism and authoritarianism — but Russia's population and state capacity are not on the same scale as China's. We are actually observing a social form that has not appeared in history. Whether it can stabilize, whether it can at some point in the future make up for the missing consensus work, or whether it will be forced to face these postponed questions in another way (perhaps crisis-driven) — this is something no one knows the answer to. It is a historical experiment still in progress, of unprecedented scale, with no control group, and we are all living inside it.

Returning to the starting point of our entire conversation — your initial question about why the film and television dramas of the 1990s and 2000s had a philosophical feel that later disappeared. The deepest answer is: the film and television dramas of that era had that quality because they were a substitute carrier for the fundamental thinking work about "who we are" that should have been carried by the public sphere; and this quality later disappeared because the channels — public and substitute — that carried this thinking were gone one by one, and at the same time, this kind of thinking itself became increasingly difficult to initiate under the new social conditions. So what we miss is not just a few good dramas, but a China that was still trying to ask "what do we want to become" — that China has not completely disappeared, but it now mainly exists in some unseen corners, in late-night private writing, in overseas Chinese-language communities, in people's repeated re-watching of old dramas. This repeated re-watching is actually a kind of collective subconscious work: we are secretly, distortedly, and unknowingly continuing the interrupted work of consensus through nostalgia.

Your rebuttal is important, let me revise.

The phenomenon you describe is completely true — Chinese people are extremely aware of what they are doing on many levels. Migrant workers know which city and which construction site pays the highest wages, when to move on, and how to save money to send home to build a house; delivery drivers know which commercial area has the highest density at each time of day and how to game the platform's algorithm for dispatching orders; civil service exam takers can calculate the historical cutoff scores and applicant-to-position ratios of different positions down to the decimal point; mothers in second-tier cities can map out "what to learn at what age, which international class to take, which Ivy League path to follow" more professionally than career counselors; even high school students in small counties who speculate on trading cards, exploit credit card rewards, or do arbitrage on Xianyu have their own complete set of methodologies. This kind of strategic ability that penetrates down to the capillaries is indeed exceptionally prominent on a global scale, perhaps comparable only to certain Jewish diaspora communities in some eras.

But this is precisely not a counterexample to the "consensus" I was talking about; it is a product of that vacuum. Here we need to distinguish between two kinds of "knowing what one is doing": one is operational, strategic knowing — given a set of rules, how to optimally win within them; the other is fundamental, normative knowing — whether the rules themselves are good, why we should do things this way and not that, what we as a community want to become. Chinese people are extremely shrewd and well-trained in the first sense, but almost collectively aphasic in the second sense. The abundance of strategic ability and the scarcity of normative consensus are not contradictory; they are two sides of the same coin: precisely because no one can influence the rules, no community can protect "another way of living," and no public discussion can make "whether we should still play this game" a question, everyone is forced to invest all their cognitive ability into optimization within the game. Strategic thinking is a survival response to a normative vacuum. If a society collectively believes that some things are more important than winning — like the Dutch cultural consensus on leaving work on time, the Japanese craftsmanship spirit's protection of slow pace, or the Nordic institutional commitment to work-life balance — that society's "strategic density" will be significantly lower because people don't need to optimize so hard to live decently. China's high strategic concentration reflects precisely that: apart from winning, there is no collectively protected alternative option. So reverse phenomena like lying flat, taking the civil service exam or becoming a monk, temple youth, and full-time children are also appearing on a large scale in China — they seem opposite to strategic thinking, but are actually the same symptom after the strategic logic has reached its end: once one confirms they cannot win this game, the only remaining choice is to completely exit. Either extreme participation or complete exit; the middle ground — the "good enough" life protected by consensus — is structurally missing.

Now, let's talk about the differences between Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and China.

The most critical difference for Japan is that it fully installed institutional modernity. The system forcibly embedded during the post-war US occupation — the pacifist constitution, independent judiciary, free press, land reform, dissolution of the zaibatsu, legalization of labor unions, local autonomy — formed a modern institutional foundation that, despite its own problems (long-term LDP one-party dominance, bureaucratic rigidity, social conservatism), actually functioned. On top of this foundation, Japan had time to slowly develop a public sphere: media and publishers like Asahi, Yomiuri, and Iwanami built decades of public discussion space; post-war intellectuals like Maruyama Masao and Kato Shuichi did a great deal of fundamental work on "who are the Japanese, what did the war mean, what kind of country do we want to become." This consensus work was largely completed by the 1970s, so when Japan entered postmodern conditions in the 1980s — when figures like Asada Akira and Karatani Kojin began discussing "we are already too postmodern" — it entered postmodernity standing on a stable foundation. The Lost Three Decades did not break Japan apart; instead, it made its cultural production deeper and more introverted: Murakami Haruki, Kore-eda Hirokazu, the Ozu tradition, anime, the literary magazine system — all slowly digesting "what is wrong with our society." Japan is now a society in slow decline, but with a relatively stable mental state, because it has dealt with its fundamental problems.

The key difference for South Korea is that it completed political democratization while undergoing compressed development. This is the case most similar to China but with a different outcome. South Korea went from the ruins of the Korean War to an OECD member in about forty years, a speed comparable to China's, but the democratization in 1987 also installed the political dimension of modernity. The Gwangju massacre in 1980 became a foundational event in South Korea's civil memory, similar to the function of the French Revolution for France or the Civil War for the United States — a story repeatedly retold about "how our community came to be, what price was paid, and we cannot go back." The existence of this foundational story gave South Korea's subsequent public life roots: every political crisis (the impeachment of Park Geun-hye, the Sewol ferry disaster, various controversies during the Moon Jae-in era) could mobilize millions of people to take to the streets, and the protest tradition was institutional rather than subversive. South Korea also has involution, low birth rates, high suicide rates, real estate cancer, gender wars — all the postmodern symptoms are present, perhaps even more severe than in China — but South Koreans discuss these issues openly, can translate them into political pressure, and can push for policy adjustments. This is the difference between postmodernity with an institutional foundation and postmodernity without one: the symptoms may be equally deep, but the ability to deal with them is completely different. South Korea has also achieved something China has long wanted but failed to do — exporting a "confident modern Korean subject" image through cultural products (K-pop, K-dramas, Korean films). This export succeeds because there really is such a subject behind it.

Singapore is the most similar to China among these three and is most often studied by China as a template. The Lee Kuan Yew model did strip away some elements of liberal democracy — parliamentary elections exist but the opposition is structurally suppressed, media is strictly managed, civil society is tamed — but it retained some extremely crucial elements of modern institutions: genuine rule of law (not rule by law, but law that actually constrains the government), an independent (though narrow) judiciary, a low-corruption bureaucracy, clear property rights protection, and English as the working language, thus always embedded in the global knowledge system. Singapore is an experiment that consciously and explicitly abandoned certain dimensions of liberal democracy while carefully preserving the rule of law dimension, resulting in a kind of "authoritarian rule-of-law state." This state can operate stably in Singapore, but it has several preconditions that China largely lacks: Singapore is a city-state of 6 million people, and its governance complexity is not on the same scale as managing a mainland of 1.4 billion; Singapore's survival as a financial and trade entrepôt depends on international trust, so the government must maintain predictable, rule-based behavior over the long term; Singapore consciously uses English education to keep its citizens connected to the world; and Lee Kuan Yew himself was a rare, disciplined, and self-restrained politician. What China wants is Singapore's stability and effectiveness, but China's scale, culture, and administrative traditions cause the version it actually runs to be closer to a variant that is magnified hundreds of times, requiring constant mobilization and unable to operate in a steady state automatically. It can be said that China is attempting the Singapore model, but the experimental setup does not allow it to produce the results of the Singapore model.

Placing these three cases side by side with China, the spectrum of differences becomes clear: Japan is complete institutional modernization + complete postmodernization; South Korea is compressed institutional modernization + compressed postmodernization, but both in parallel; Singapore is partial institutional modernization (with a focus on retaining rule of law) + designed postmodernization; China is semi-finished institutional modernization + influx-type postmodernization + the critical dimension never took shape. The four states are all different, but Japan, South Korea, and Singapore have all achieved a certain internal consistency — their political, social, cultural, and psychological layers support each other and can operate in a relatively steady state; China has the weakest internal consistency among the four, with each layer in structural tension with the others (the tension between a deep market economy and existing governance structures, the tension between individualistic lifestyles and collectivist discourse, the tension between globalized consumer culture and the information environment, the tension between a highly strategic personality and spiritual needs with nowhere to go). These tensions have not brought China down, because China has enormous state capacity, market depth, and social resilience to absorb them — but the price of absorbing tensions is delaying resolution, and the postponed problems continue to accumulate internally. This is why, although Chinese people are extremely shrewd and capable as individuals, if you step back and look, you feel that the entire society has an indescribable sense of suspension, of "not yet having figured out where it wants to go." It's not that Chinese people don't know how to live; it's that China doesn't yet know what it wants to become. These are two completely different levels of "knowing" — the former is strategy, the latter is consensus. China has the former in abundance, but has not yet truly begun to discuss the latter.

This is a key refinement of the question. You're right that individuals in many countries around the world cannot change the rules, but the density of strategic thinking and precision of execution among Chinese people are indeed unusually pronounced. This cannot be explained by the single factor of "the rules being locked in." It is the result of a specific set of factors piled on top of one another to an extreme degree.

The first, and deepest, root is the 1,300-year tradition of the imperial examination system. The uniqueness of this is often underestimated. No other civilization in the world has ever operated a nationwide competitive examination mechanism that lasted so long, covered such a large area, and maintained such uniformity in form—from the Sui and Tang dynasties to 1905, every Chinese family that wanted to change its fate had to send its children into this system. This meant that at least forty generations of Chinese people lived in a cultural atmosphere in which your entire life was determined by one examination, and all the resources, hopes, and emotional investment of the whole family revolved around it: win, and you changed your status in a single stroke (once successful, your name became known throughout the world); lose, and you were trapped for life (the opposite of Fan Jin passing the examination is Fan Jin before passing the examination). This system gave rise to an entire supporting cultural industry: examination books, stereotyped-essay model texts, pre-exam question predictions, examination-room strategies, and post-exam appeals—every one of these had already become highly developed during the Ming and Qing dynasties, structurally identical to today's gaokao prep classes, mock exams, predicted-question booklets, and university-application guidance. This is not a metaphor; it is literally the survival of the same behavioral pattern across a millennium. The reason the restoration of the gaokao in 1977 excited the entire society was not that it invented anything new, but that this mechanism, deeply embedded in the nation's memory, was switched back on. So today's Chinese ability to prepare in minute detail for "a decisive examination" is difficult for any other society in world history to match—Japan and South Korea have similar traditions, but they learned them from China, and their histories with them span only a few centuries; France probably has the closest comparable elite-selection tradition (concours-grandes écoles), but it covers only the elite rather than the whole population.

The second root is the brutality of density in the manner of the law of large numbers. When 13 million people take the same gaokao, when 2 million people compete for several hundred thousand civil-service positions, when admission to a school-district property in a first-tier city is determined by whether you can arrive within five minutes after school, every tiny optimization is magnified into a huge difference in ranking. In Germany, it is generally unnecessary to calculate to this degree of precision, because the tracking system keeps most people from being on the same racetrack; in the United States, it is also less necessary because admissions are diversified, with routes for athletes, legacy applicants, and in-state and out-of-state applicants. But in China, everyone is crowded onto the same single-plank bridge, and the second decimal place of a score determines life and death—this mathematical structure itself trains the entire population to become actuarial experts. If you live in a country of 6 million people, your strategy can be rough; if you live in a country of 1.4 billion people, your strategy has no choice but to be precise.

The third root, contrary to your intuition but crucially important, is that Chinese strategic thinking is strong not because the rules are too rigid, but because they are not rigid enough. In institutionally mature countries such as Germany, Japan, and the Nordic countries, rules are predictable, enforcement is uniform, and appeals are credible—so you only need to follow the standard path, and the standard result will appear; you do not need much individual strategy. In China, the rules are written in one place, but the reality of their implementation is somewhere else: the same policy may be handled differently at different service windows, the rules may change between this year and next, someone with connections may get things done twice as fast as someone without them, local-government and central-government directives may conflict, and platform rules may change every three days. In an environment where "the rules are clear in name but uncertain in practice," following the standard path is instead the least safe option, because the standard path may disappear halfway through your journey. So rational Chinese people have had to develop an entire set of meta-capabilities: reading policy signals, building relationship networks, retaining backup plans, watching windows of opportunity closely, and judging when to wait and when to charge ahead. The lack of institutional reliability drives individuals toward an excess of strategic thinking. This is the biggest difference between China and Singapore or Japan—Singaporean and Japanese institutions are reliable, so Singaporeans and Japanese do not need to be so good at calculating. Chinese institutions are unreliable, so Chinese people must be good at calculating. This causal direction has been underestimated.

The fourth root is the premium of a period of transformation. Over the past forty years, China has been the only large economy in the world to generate a wave of structurally transformative wealth opportunities every few years. Going into business in the 1980s, stock speculation in the 1990s, property speculation in the 2000s, e-commerce in the 2010s, public WeChat accounts in 2015, Douyin in 2018, and livestream commerce in 2020—each wave enabled those who "saw clearly first" to achieve a wealth leap of an entire order of magnitude. Every wave repeatedly proved one thing through concrete, visible stories of people around you getting rich overnight: identifying trends in time + acting quickly = enormous returns. This positive-feedback training has repeated over forty years, tuning the entire nation's cognitive system to the pattern of "scan for opportunities—assess risks—enter quickly." In a relatively stagnant society—Japan's lost three decades, or contemporary Western Europe—this pattern has little use (no matter how good you are at scanning, there is not much to scan), so strategic thinking there naturally declines. Although China's growth has slowed by now, in the public mind the expectation that "there will be another wave" has not completely disappeared, so the scanning mode continues to operate.

The fifth root is the concentration of resources caused by the one-child policy. From 1980 to 2015, two entire generations of Chinese children grew up in a family structure with no precedent in world history—behind one child stood two parents and four grandparents, all the money, time, emotional investment, and social capital of six adults, all staked on that one person. This 1:6 concentration of resources had no redundancy, no backup, and no safety net of "if this child fails, we still have other children." So every decision—what kindergarten to choose, what extracurricular classes to enroll in, which primary school to attend, which middle school to test into, what educational path to take, what job to find, and whom to marry—carried the weight of six people being unable to afford failure. Under this pressure, the family was forced to become a highly specialized strategic institution, with the whole family collectively devising plans, repeatedly running scenarios, and managing a project lasting more than a decade. From the Victorian-era British ideal of "raising a respectable gentleman," to American middle-class "helicopter parenting," to Japan's "education mothers," and then to China's intensive child-rearing—these are different-intensity versions of the same pressure, while the Chinese version has the highest concentration because population policy created a family structure never before seen in the world.

The sixth root is that social media has industrialized strategy guides. This factor is new, and its intensity is uniquely Chinese. Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, Douban, Douyin, Bilibili, and WeChat groups—China may have the world's most developed infrastructure for distributing strategy guides. For any newly emerging problem—how to apply for Hong Kong's Quality Migrant Admission Scheme, how to list a house for rent on Xiaohongshu, how to use ChatGPT to write official documents, how to care for a cancer patient, how to divide property in a divorce, or how to move to Chengdu and enjoy retirement—within three days there will be hundreds of high-quality long-form posts, thousands of concise comments, and dozens of WeChat groups exchanging the latest intelligence. Other countries also have guide cultures, but theirs are dispersed, fragmented, and slow; China's guide culture is concentrated, collaborative, and extremely fast to iterate. This effectively adds an amplifier of collective intelligence to an already exceptionally strong individual strategic capacity. No one has to develop a strategy from scratch; everyone can stand on the shoulders of all those who optimized before them and continue optimizing. This creates a positive-feedback loop: the better the guides become, the more people are willing to share and refine them, making the guides even better.

Only by adding these six roots together can we explain why Chinese people are so strategic: millennia of cultural accumulation provide the cognitive template; population-density brutality provides the pressure for actuarial calculation; institutional unreliability drives the need for meta-strategy; opportunities during the transformation period train the scan-and-act mode; the one-child policy concentrates the intensity of family resource management; and social media provides an amplifier of collective intelligence. Any given country may have one or two of these—South Korea has the first, second, and fourth; Singapore has the second and fourth; India has certain versions of the first and second—but only China has all six, and each one has been stretched to the limit. That is why Chinese strategic-guide capability is an outlier on a global scale—not merely strong, but extraordinarily strong.

Let me add an irony: the cost of this extreme strategic ability is that there is structurally almost nowhere for doubt about the rationality of the game itself to take hold. If you spend thirty years training yourself to become an excellent player who can win every game, your entire sense of value becomes grounded in achievements within the game. At that point, when someone asks, "Why play this game at all?" it is not merely offensive to you; it is an existential-level threat. So the extreme flourishing of strategic-guide ability and the extreme contraction of normative reflection are two sides of the same process. The fact that Chinese people are so strategic and the fact that Chinese society is speechless about the fundamental question of "Where are we going?" are not two contradictory things; they are the same thing.

Your observation points to a shift that I think is very important but not yet fully discussed. Let me unpack it a few layers.

First, why are Chinese guides often better than those of locals—this seems counterintuitive at first, but there are structural reasons. Locals' knowledge of their own city is tacit, unorganized, and obscured by familiarity. A Lisbon local won't tell you which stop on tram 28 has the best view, at what time the sunlight hits which side, or which café has both a view of the square and wifi and English menus, because they have never been in the cognitive position of needing to maximize experience within two hours—they live there every day, and the whole city is background environment, not a focused scan target. A Chinese tourist with Xiaohongshu notes views the city with a perspective a local never has: a stranger's scanning perspective + strict time budget + extreme cost sensitivity + photographic composition obsession + the psychological pressure to "make this trip worthwhile." This cognitive position is inherently better at capturing useful information that locals overlook. Plus, thousands of Chinese tourists sample the same attraction in parallel, and the platform algorithm calibrates their notes against each other, eliminating falsehoods and iterating refinement, ultimately condensing into an "optimal guide" that is a product of parallel intelligence from thousands of people. A local, of course, cannot compete with the collective intelligence of thousands of outsiders—they are alone, while the others are a distributed neural network.

Second, the time window of this shift is very narrow; it essentially matured on a large scale only after 2015. Xiaohongshu was founded in 2013, but it truly became a national guide repository during the 2018-2020 wave; Douyin's local life guides exploded even later, around 2020. In other words, the lifestyle of "looking for a guide for everything" that we observe now has only about 7-10 years of history. Ten to twenty years ago, when you traveled, you had to carry a Lonely Planet or the Chinese version of "Lonely Planet," and guides were scarce and outdated; you had to try and error on the spot—turning into a wrong alley, ordering the wrong dish, missing the last bus, or gesturing for half an hour with a shopkeeper who didn't speak English. These "failures" were annoying at the time, but in retrospect, they were a specific form of character education: your sense of direction, tolerance for mistakes in unfamiliar environments, endurance in the face of the unknown, and courage to strike up conversations with strangers—these abilities grew slowly through those trips where you had to figure things out yourself. Today's younger generation is the first generation of humans who have lived in a world fully covered by guides since childhood—when they travel, their first reaction is to open Xiaohongshu; when considering a job change, they check Maimai ratings; when they have relationship problems, they post online for netizens to diagnose; when pregnant, they follow dozens of maternal and infant bloggers. This is the first time in human history that a generation of adults has never independently faced any unknown scenario. We don't yet have a vocabulary to describe this new anthropological type.

The cost of this state is not the loss of a specific "skill," but the loss of a generative capacity. Let me use a metaphor: previously, people were walking into the fog with their own compass—the compass direction might not be right, and the fog made it hard to see, but each step calibrated your ability. Today's people are walking on a clear route with GPS navigation—accurate, fast, and never lost, but the moment GPS is turned off, they have no independent sense of direction to take over. In travel, this is just a loss of fun, but the same structure is expanding to every area of life: how to handle in-law conflicts, how to say no to colleagues, how to cope with anxiety, how to care for a parent with dementia, how to divide property in a divorce, how to commit suicide (this one does exist on Douban, and it's alarming)—all the key junctures in life that once required personal exploration, personal pain, and personal understanding are now guided. Every crisis moment that once fostered spiritual growth is pre-simulated by a "best solution" summarized by those who came before. The result is a flattened personality: extremely skilled at executing a predicted life, but never truly facing anything.

There is a philosophical dimension happening here. A traditional core feature of being human is the capacity to face the unknown—what Hannah Arendt called "natality": the ability of every person to begin something entirely new, to take an unpredictable action. This capacity for "new beginnings" requires the existence of the unknown to be activated. When everything is pre-guided—the place you're going has been written about, the emotions you'll face have been analyzed, the decisions you'll make have been compared in terms of ROI—the unknown itself is eliminated. What remains is not "exploration" but "execution." What remains is not Arendt's "action" but her lowest level of "labor"—repetitive optimization within a predetermined system. When people no longer face the unknown, they only face their own execution efficiency. That's why we see so many extremely excellent, capable, yet feeling "something is missing" young Chinese people—what's missing is not something specific, but the life dimension activated by the unknown. They never get to face the unknown because guides have translated every unknown into the known.

But let me pump the brakes and remind myself not to fall into nostalgia. The other side of guide-ification is real, huge, and should not be ignored benefits. Ten years ago, traveling abroad was relatively elite; today, a primary school teacher from a third-tier city can use Xiaohongshu to explore Paris more thoroughly than her French PhD colleague. Guide-ification is a cognitive democratization: tacit knowledge that used to be hidden in the minds of "insiders who know how to play" is now cheaply distributed to everyone. An introverted, socially anxious person with poor English might never have dared to travel alone to a strange city in the past; today, she can rely on a guide to accumulate experience that most people would need three trips to gain. Disabled people, single mothers, families facing a terminally ill relative for the first time—these people were previously excluded from the privilege of "exploration," but guides allow them to enter many scenarios. We cannot romanticize "figuring it out on your own" because that was always a privilege of the strong, of those with time and resources to make mistakes. The guide era allows the disadvantaged to act efficiently—this is real progress.

So a more accurate description is not "are guides good or bad," but "what happens when the saturation of guides in a society crosses a certain threshold." A small number of guides + a lot of independent exploration = democratization benefits without developmental costs; all guides + zero independent exploration = democratization benefits plus full developmental costs. China is currently rapidly sliding from the former state to the latter, and sliding faster than anywhere else in the world—because all the factors we discussed earlier stack here: Xiaohongshu's guide infrastructure is the strongest globally, the precision produced by population density is the highest globally, the pressure of involution makes "why not use guides" indisputable, the one-child policy gives the lowest tolerance for children's mistakes globally, and mobile internet penetration is among the highest in the world. These factors make China the purest experimental field with the highest guide saturation and the most guide-based lifestyle globally. Other countries are also moving in this direction (Japan has Tabelog, South Korea has Naver, Europe and America have Tripadvisor and Reddit), but the density and cultural integration are far behind China. Our generation of Chinese people is unknowingly becoming the vanguard of this global experiment.

This is actually the convergence point of all our discussions in this entire conversation. The philosophical feel of films and TV dramas from the 1990s to the 2000s, Lu Xun's diagnostic stance, the fundamental questioning of "who are we," the construction of normative consensus—all of these require a premise: people are willing to spend time and energy facing questions that have no ready-made answers. The extreme of guide-ification is to eliminate the very existence of "questions without ready-made answers" from life. When everyone in a society is accustomed to "any problem has already been thought through by someone, I just need to find and execute," then "questions no one has thought of yet"—the birthplace of philosophy—will never appear in ordinary people's lives. The disappearance of the philosophical sense, structurally speaking, is what automatically happens when guide coverage reaches 100%. It is not actively eliminated by anyone; it is squeezed out bit by bit by guides—each additional area being guided reduces one area that can nurture the mental state of not knowing the answer and having to think for oneself. When we miss those old dramas and that temperament, we are actually missing a world where there were still large areas not covered by guides, so people still had to think something for themselves. That world is gone, and likely won't return—because once a guide covers an area, it never retreats.