China’s everyday “normality” can feel deceptively old—for those born later than the 1990s at least: safe streets, two-day weekends, basic welfare, passports on demand, and Hollywood blockbusters. But as Liu Yuanju, research fellow at the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law, stitches together the timeline of China’s compressed modernity, comforts now treated as timeless emerge as fragile gains of just a couple of decades. His piece is a reflective reminder that the past is indeed a foreign country, and that any serious conversation about China’s future needs a clearer memory of how recently this “normality” was built.

The article was first published on FT Chinese, the Chinese-language service of the Financial Times, on 21 June 2024, although we have only just come across it recently. Both FT Chinese and Liu have kindly authorised a translation, but have not reviewed the following text.

—Yuxuan Jia

When I first commissioned this piece, Yuxuan joked that it felt rather “gongzhi”—a label sometimes in China to describe writing that instinctively cherishes economic reform, market openness, and the possibilities unlocked by a freer, more expansive society. Perhaps. But what struck me, and may resonate with readers elsewhere, is something simpler and more human: that a country capable of changing this much, this quickly, inevitably carries within it many forms of disorientation—material, psychological, institutional, even spiritual. What appears uneven, contradictory, or insufficient today is not always a matter of intention or ideology; sometimes it is merely the consequence of modernity arriving in a rush, before society has had the time to absorb it fully.

China’s everyday normality—its safety, mobility, insufficient welfare, and cultural horizons—was not inherited but assembled, often painstakingly, within a few short decades. The tensions and anxieties visible now are, in part, the shadows cast by that compressed ascent. To see this clearly is not to romanticise or excuse, but to understand: nations, like people, need time to metabolise change, to let new habits settle into deeper foundations.

And perhaps that is the quiet truth running beneath Liu Yuanju’s essay: that what was built so swiftly can also be fragile—that the very speed of these gains invites us to ask how easily they might be lost, and how much care is needed to sustain them.

—— Zichen Wang

你所熟知的时代，才开始没多久

The Era You Know Hasn’t Been Around for Long

Introduction

Good times haven’t been around for long, so