Long read: The man making a business out of China’s burnout generation

This long read in The Guardian is the story of a high-flying marketing executive from China, Li Jianxiong, who had a mid-life crisis and then had to reinvent himself to survive. For middle aged professionals like Li this story feels like one that we live through every day. In that regard, Li’s rediscovery of purpose after rethinking what he wants from life is a motivational, in fact an aspirational, read.

Li was born in 1984 in an impoverished farming family in Henan province. As the Chinese liberalised and became the factory of the world over the next 30 years, Li – like a billion other Chinese people – worked maniacally hard to rise in the world. “By 2017, he had secured a family, a house in Beijing and a reputation as one of China’s most talented young marketing men…

When Li joined TAL at 27, he became one of the youngest senior directors at a publicly listed firm in China. He made himself indispensable, and the job repaid him with wealth and clout. His corporate rank qualified him for a Beijing hukou, a residence permit, which constituted a crowning achievement for the son of farmers who had learned to eat tree bark during the darkest days of Mao’s rule. “Those were truly the golden years,” Li recalled. “Everything was moving so fast.””

However, Li’s success came at a cost. “China had become notorious for its “996” work culture – 9am to 9pm, six days a week – but Li was working something closer to 007: 24 hours a day, every day…

Li could not talk about his problems at work. “There wasn’t that kind of culture,” he told me. “No colleague ever said, ‘You look tired, Jianxiong.’” The trouble at TAL hastened Li’s own crisis, and his stress inevitably followed him home. Every morning, at 4am, he’d stare at his bedroom ceiling while listening to the sound of the cleaner’s broom outside his apartment window. He began to suffer from headaches and his temper we often think, ‘What’s the big deal with health problems?’”

Throughout 2017, Li was so absent from his son’s life that it had become something of a running joke among fellow parents in his neighbourhood: none of them knew what he looked like. “He’d come home late, have a beer and just sit by himself,” Rose told me. One day, Li pinched his son’s face so hard that Rose recorded the incident in a memo to herself. “It felt like he was losing control,” she said.

That autumn, Li hit his low point. He broke out in a severe rash that doctors diagnosed as shingles, a strain of chickenpox that had probably reactivated due to stress. He became so weak that he needed Rose to administer his medicine. At the time Rose struggled to find the words for Li’s condition, though looking back now, she thinks he was suffering from depression. In a blog post, Li described it with a metaphor: “My life seemed to descend into an endless black hole of nothingness.””

Li quit his job in Dec 2018 and then did a whole bunch of unusual things: “In Li’s telling, his second life began in 2018, when he left his lucrative job. Feeling broken and beleaguered, he treated himself as an experiment in self-rescue. He dabbled in Freud, read around in positive psychology, and familiarised himself with the writings of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. He absorbed biographies of Gandhi and Mother Teresa. He travelled to sacred Taoist sites in Hubei, an ecological healing village in Guizhou, a Buddhist charity house headquartered in Taiwan. He even moved to the US for a time, where he attended Christian self-development retreats and studied religion at Columbia University…

“I wanted to understand what other countries, including the US, were doing in psychology and community culture,” Li told me in Beijing.

In his application letter to Columbia’s programme director, Li warned of an impending moral crisis unfolding in China. Materialism had overwhelmed the country, anxieties were “piling up” and values were “breaking down”. His proposed antidote was a mixture of western psychology and traditional Chinese culture. In New York, Li began frequenting the city’s many museums and parks until he experienced something of an epiphany. Three decades of fast-paced growth had deprived Chinese society of “third places”. Beijing, unlike New York, didn’t have the social infrastructure that helped foster a sense of belonging. His whole society seemed to feel weightless…

At Columbia, Li began hosting discussion groups with other Chinese burnouts about midlife crisis. The hackneyed western concept, which evokes Lamborghinis and extramarital trysts, has recently found new use in China, where personal ruptures are being connected with societal upheavals. For Li’s community in New York, as well as many of those back home, the midlife crisis was national as much as it was personal: it was not a coincidence, in other words, that a new stage of individual life had arrived just as the nation had moved into a slower, more chastened era of growth. “People of all ages are experiencing a crisis now,” Li says.”

In 2020 Li retuned to China and in April 2021 he did something even more unusual: “Li founded a mutual-support community for burnouts that he called Heartify. The programme was loosely based on Alcoholics Anonymous, which he discovered while researching self-help groups in New York. Heartify began with 20 people meeting at a Taiwanese restaurant in Beijing’s 798 Art District. Today it employs 100 instructors, along with dozens of volunteers, to teach a “night school” that hosts classes and workshops dedicated to wellbeing. Customers pay the equivalent of £50 to attend six weekly two-hour seminars. Each course explores a different therapeutic method, from meditation and flower arranging to farming and ancient Chinese philosophy. In the three and a half years of Heartify’s existence, tens of thousands of people have participated in its programmes.

Li, who is now 40, is short and unassuming, with close-cut hair, square-rimmed glasses and a gaze that one of his volunteers described as foxi, a slang term that evokes a Buddha-like calm. He talks about his biography in quasi-prophetic terms. “My story is like a phoenix rising from the ashes,” he told me last summer, when we met at a trendy, wood-panelled cafe in central Beijing. These were ornate terms for what Li would later characterise as a “midlife crisis”, but in one sense, this grandiosity was apt. For the personal and professional crises that ultimately led him to establish Heartify were symptoms of a broader unhappiness among China’s striving middle class.

For people like Li and many of Heartify’s customers, who grew up poor in China’s rural provinces, the gospel of the New China, which promised prosperity in exchange for hard work and sacrifice, was the closest thing to a religious faith they ever had. But by the mid-2010s, and especially since Covid, many of those same people came to see their devotion as a false promise. In China today, nearly one in five young people are unemployed. Local governments are bogged down in debt. The flagging property market, once the engine of the Chinese economy, has caused the country’s annual growth rates to fall to the low single digits. Though the Communist party has tried to re-energize the country under the banner of “Xi Jinping Thought” – which envisions a muscular future powered by hi-tech industries and a revival of Confucian traditions – many Chinese have begun to wonder about the wisdom of striving endlessly for a better future that never seems to arrive.

Li established Heartify as a response to this malaise. Though diverse in their backgrounds and occupations, his clients share a loss of faith in the social structures that once sustained their ambition and hard work. “When reality doesn’t give them enough space, either because of the slowing economy or other factors, more people will be pushed to turn inward,” Li told me. Heartify is one of many projects and services around self-exploration that have emerged in a post-pandemic China, where a slack economy and a frozen political system have left the country’s urban population disillusioned with the Chinese Dream. Li, whose crisis in 2018 led him to renounce that ideal earlier than many of his peers, became a natural guide. In the words of one Heartify employee, after the pandemic, when “everyone was lost”, Li was “the one person who was searching for a light, a direction”.”

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