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.
Chinese nostalgia exerts such a pull because the past people yearn for has disappeared so quickly
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. So what’s there to be nostalgic about? How can today’s Chinese be nostalgic about a poorer, harsher time?
The obvious answer is that most people are nostalgic about their past. Those with happy childhoods look back on a less stressful, more innocent age. But even those who had a more gruelling time may have bright spots of happiness they recall fondly. When my mother thinks of the 1970s, it’s not the Cultural Revolution she remembers, nor the fact that her siblings had been sent to different relatives when her parents were imprisoned. Instead she remembers how happy she was foraging for wild veg with her sister and climbing trees with the local boys. She reminisces about ‘the simpler times’.
Chinese nostalgia, I think, exerts such a pull because the past people yearn for has disappeared so quickly. The economy is 120 times bigger than in 1978, the year Deng’s reforms began. There are hundreds more cities now and hundreds of millions more people living in them: cities like Shenzhen, the 13 million-strong metropolis built on the site of a town of 300,000, bulldozed in the 1980s. It’s hard to find a street anywhere that looks the same as it did 50 years ago.
A few years ago, my family revisited my grandparents’ first home, on a state-owned farm where they worked in a commune and where my mother and her siblings grew up. That way of life is gone now, as is their house and the farm – all derelict. My grandmother’s contemporaries had, like her, moved into city apartments and spent their days looking after grandchildren. The fields and tree-lined dirt road to the nearest town had been dug up, but the new homes that were meant to be built there hadn’t yet been started. It had been like that for a while, we were told.
The changes are more than just material. In the words of one Chinese blogger: ‘As the economy got better, the affection between people has gone.’ The migration to anonymous mega-cities cut community ties and boosted crime; you could no longer rely on a neighbour for last-minute childcare or leave your door unlocked. With increased wealth came more corruption and inequality. Neighbours became envious of each other and competed. Success in school, work or even marriage could be life-changing not only for yourself, but for your children. ‘At least when people were poor, we were all poor together,’ a Chinese businessman once told me.
Some lament the spiritual hollowness of modern life. Communism offered something to believe in, as religion had done before that. Without either, people feel empty. So some Chinese speak about a crisis of meaning; a vacuum left by the death of ideology. It may be why the incredible economic boom of the 1990s coincided with a national revival of Tai Chi, the semi-religious meditation practice.
So what do the nostalgic Chinese do when they can’t find a trace of their childhood homes or the streets they grew up on? They seek out shops peddling memories. They escape to the countryside. They listen to retro music from Taiwan and Hong Kong, the stuff that was popular before music from the mainland caught up. Some even travel to North Korea, which was booming as a tourist destination until the pandemic hit, with 120,000 Chinese visiting in 2019. On return, they write online that ‘It’s just like China in the 1970s!’ They mean it as a compliment.
But like scratching an itch, the indulgence is unsatisfactory. Spend too long in the childhood shops and you’ll notice the goods are overpriced and tacky. The supposedly tranquil countryside spots are Potemkin villages with shiny visitor centres, car parks big enough to cater for twice the village’s population and trendy coffee shops that certainly weren’t there in the 1970s. And behind every rural influencer, there’s almost certainly a small gaggle of city-based crew armed with professional lighting and kit.
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