Why China’s nostalgia industry is booming

00:00 05:20

Cindy Yu has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Nostalgia is a thriving industry in China. I first noticed this while walking around Nanjing last summer. There were shops with names like ‘Finding Childhood’ or ‘Childhood Memories’, selling sweets and toys that had long been discontinued. There were posters of TV shows and celebrities from the 1980s and 1990s. The customers were like me – misty-eyed millennials, often women, looking for their lost childhoods. ‘Oh my god, remember that!’ We relished every moment.

The shops have sprung up suddenly in the past two years, mostly catering to my generation, who spend more on high-street tat than our elders. But older Chinese have been seeking nostalgia too. They get their hit from remembering a more rural way of life. Villages on the edges of cities have been renovated for the urban day-tripper and designed to feel tranquil, agrarian, evocative of a China before Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. Wealthier urbanites buy up rural cottages there for second homes, as if they can buy back their own pasts.

Social media has no end of ‘trad’ content. There’s a huge market for rural influencers who grow their own food and cook from scratch on wood-fired stoves. Some are young people who say they’ve become burnt out by city life. Last year’s hottest TV show, Blossoms Shanghai, is set in the 1990s and shot mostly in sepia tones.

There’s nothing uniquely Chinese about yearning for the past. Populists everywhere have found nostalgia a helpful emotion. Vote Leave had ‘Take Back Control’; Donald Trump had ‘Make America Great Again’.

But whereas western countries might lament their relative fall in power or economic dynamism, the same can’t be said for China. If anything, China’s ‘good old days’ are now – the country is more powerful than it has been in centuries; living standards, life expectancy, education rates are higher than at any time in history.