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The Economic Factors Behind the Conservative Turn in the Mindset of Chinese Youth
As is well known, in the 1990s, a hypothesis became popular among Western politicians and social scientists: if the West supported China’s Reform and Opening-up policies and bolstered China’s economic growth through expanded economic ties, the resulting expansion of the middle class would lead to demands for greater civil rights. This, in turn, would lead…
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Trialogue: Is Romantic Love Unique?
Editor’s Note: This dialogue brings together two enthusiastic discussants of this blog, Orcanète and ImageNoise, and the blogger Stephen Leng to discuss the topic of uniqueness in romantic love. The main text was completed independently and sequentially by the three participants, while the comment section is expected to host further dialogue among the three; meanwhile,…
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Why the Right to Privacy Matters
In China, “rights” are not, for many people, a particularly important idea—let alone the right to privacy. Even when people realize their privacy has been violated, it’s hard for them to think, “one of my rights is being infringed,” rather than merely, “my feelings are hurt.” In my view, there are three kinds of privacy…
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Raising Children Can Be Seen as Humanity’s Most Common Selfless Act
Ever since there have been human beings, we have, like other animals, reproduced without pause. In most cultures, raising children functions almost like an auto-program installed in the brain. Genuine reflection on parenting itself may be largely a modern development, and a scientific understanding of it has only really emerged over the past half-century. Does…
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Capitalism Is the Best Era for Romantic Love — and Where Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving Goes Wrong
For people on the Left, nothing seems easier than sitting in one’s study, nightcap on, brooding over the defects of capitalism and posting lofty takes on social media. I could do that too, but playing the cynic isn’t really my style. The dramatic collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—and China and…
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Lacan in the Matchmaking Ad: Postmodernism and Feminism Through the Lens of Costly Signaling Theory
One day, I happened to see a WeChat Offical account post a matchmaking ad for a young woman. For various reasons of relevance, I clicked in with interest. Three things caught my eye: first, she required the man to provide a marital home in Shanghai; second, she refused premarital sex. Let’s pause there for a…
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On the Shanghai Marriage Market
What many Chinese people may not know is that the Shanghai Marriage Market is internationally famous, and it’s a spot many foreign travelers to Shanghai make a point of visiting. It has a detailed English Wikipedia entry, yet not even a Chinese one. Several English-language travel sites have written how-to guides for visiting it. There…
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Eating While Looking at Your Phone
One afternoon, I was installing a custom Rom on my phone. Even though it was a 2024 model, it still only had USB 2.0, so data transfer was painfully slow—and I had a lot to back up and restore. Dinner time rolled around and the job still wasn’t done, but I had to eat, so…
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Falling in Love as a Transformative Experience
Why do we describe the act of loving someone as “falling in love”? It is not entirely clear who first used this expression, but it is said to have originated around the early modern period, around 1500, and some people connect it to Shakespeare. Fall in love has long become a commonplace expression in English,…
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The Substantial Foundation of Work-Life Balance: High-Quality Private Time
The phenomenon of extremely long working hours—more than 40 hours per week—exists in both the United States and China. Yet in the U.S., it is mostly confined to a few “bloodsucking” industries, while in China, it permeates nearly every sector of the workforce. One could say that the U.S. lacks a widespread overtime culture, but…