Dreaming of Zhu Rongji's China | Zhao Jian

"That feeling of being protected, that comforting certainty that 'if the sky fell, there would be someone tall enough to hold it up', just seems like something from a previous life."

The death of Zhu Rongji, the former premier of China who spearheaded market-oriented economic reforms during the 1990s, was announced on Wednesday. The following obituary is by the economist Zhao Jian, an advocate of renewed marketisation and an admirer of Zhu’s forceful approach to driving through a series of state enterprise restructurings and market-oriented reforms. Judging by the article’s removal from WeChat a day after publication, it may have touched a nerve.

Nominally written as an obituary for Zhu, the piece is really his lament for a bygone era when Chinese society felt confident, people said what they really thought and there was an assurance, felt by Zhao while watching leaders speak on the television, “that someone was holding up the weight of this country, that someone was giving his all for us”.

Zhao is unabashedly nostalgic. In expressing the wish that he might awake from a present-day dream and find himself back in the world of Zhu’s premiership, his piece is reminiscent of the “Dreamcore” aesthetic—a trend where internet users adapt hazy images of 2000s scenes to evoke nostalgia for an apparently simpler time. But instead of limiting himself to vignettes of danwei-distributed ice lollies and internet cafés, Zhao’s essay is a more overtly politicised form of Dreamcore. He regards Zhu Rongji together with Jiang Zemin, China’s top leader at the time, as the embodiments of that era’s sense of confidence. Compared to the relative freedom and perceived certainties back then, he describes the society of today as suffocating and draining.

Such nostalgia merits mention of the obvious: living standards have significantly improved in China over the last two decades. Zhao is acutely aware of this, and admits that trying to find a single culprit for the current feeling of hopelessness is like “throwing a punch only for it to land on cotton wool”. There is no one cause he can identify: the anti-corruption drive, deflating the property bubble—even “stability maintenance” by local governments and the online censorship that has left his essay peppered with euphemisms—can each be justified or defended on some rational basis. Taken together though, he sees them as constituting one problem: a broader loss of trust.

— James Farquharson

The Scholar

Name: Zhao Jian (赵建)
Year of birth: September 1980 (Age: 45)
Position: Founder and President, Xijing Institute; Professor, School of Business, University of Jinan; Director, Institute of Strategy, Shanghai Chief Economist Financial Development Center
Previously: Chief Economist, Bank of Qingdao; Director, Macroeconomic Research Centre, Ping An Bank
Research focus: Macroeconomic analysis
Education: Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Shandong University of Finance and Economics (2004); MA in Finance, Shandong University (2007); PhD in Finance, Shandong University (2010), jointly trained at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Experience Abroad: Visiting scholar, University at Buffalo, State University of New York (2009–2010); research experience at the Finance Laboratory, Niagara University

HE’S GONE. HOW I WISH THIS WERE ALL ONE LONG DREAM
By Zhao Jian (赵建)
Published by Xijing Research Institute on 12 August 2026
Human-edited machine translation
(Illustration by ChatGPT)

He’s gone.

When the news came, I was scrolling through my phone. The obituary notice that popped up on the screen was so short that it left me dazed. So then, the man who once spoke on television with such powerful force of personality [挥斥方遒] and such ringing conviction [铿锵有力] had already reached the age of ninety-eight. The man whom we imagined would always be around—somewhere in the world—had really gone.

Suddenly, this world seemed like one long dream.

Late at night when everyone falls silent, I often lie staring, blankly, at the ceiling. Outside the window are the lights of a city that never go out. From downstairs, the footsteps of someone returning home late can occasionally be heard. I gaze around, observing this world and then myself. Where is this? Who am I? How did everything come to be like this?

I want to pinch myself. Really, pinch myself hard.

If it hurts, that would prove this is not a dream. But if that is the case, why does everything feel so unreal?

How I wish this were all just a long dream and that I might awake to find myself back thirty years ago. There were no smartphones then, no short-form videos and no screens filled by the purveyors of anxiety. The sky was blue, life moved slowly and people could say what they really thought [话是可以直说的]. We were poor then, properly poor. A month’s wages would not buy more than a few jin of meat. We lived in communal corridor blocks [筒子楼], travelled by bicycle and could only afford a new item of clothing at Chinese New Year. Yet people had a light in their eyes and a sense of standing on solid ground [心里有底]. Tomorrow was something they could see.

We believed then that hard work would be rewarded, that good things would come to good people and that things in this world could all be reasoned out.

Back then, he would pound the table on television, thundering that even “minefields” [地雷阵] had to be crossed and denouncing “tofu-dreg” [豆腐渣] construction projects.¹ Sitting in front of our black-and-white televisions, we had the feeling that someone was holding up the weight of this country, that someone was giving his all for us [这个国家有人在扛着，有人在为我们拼命]. Reflecting on it now, that feeling of being protected, that comforting certainty that “if the sky fell, there would be someone tall enough to hold it up” [天塌下来有个高的人顶着], just seems like something from a previous life.

III.

CCTV recently broadcast a documentary about Jiang Zemin [Note: Zhao employs the nickname “长者”, or “the Elder”²]. On the screen, he felt just as affable, wise and effortlessly assured as ever. Suddenly, I became aware that the people who shaped that era are leaving us, one by one.

They really are gone.

As people born in the 1980s, ours is the generation that was raised to adulthood by that era. We grew up listening to their speeches, and with their receding figures ahead of us. We assumed that this was simply how the world was meant to be: it had authority, direction, a prevailing theme [主旋律] and a clear sense of right and wrong, truth and travesty [是非曲直].

China was far less developed then than it is today. There were no high-speed trains, no aircraft carriers and no position as the world’s second-largest economy. The international situation was extremely turbulent and our domestic contradictions were a mess of tangled branches [盘根错节]. Everyone lived life on a shoestring. Meat was seldom seen on the dinner table and wardrobes held the same few clothes, worn over and over again. Yet strangely, people did not feel that life was hard.

Or rather, life was hard, but it was hardship sustained by hope [苦得有盼头].

And now? We have material abundance, choice, skylines bristling with high-rises and streets teeming with traffic. Open your phone and the entire world’s cuisine is yours to order. Open a shopping app and goods from around the world will be delivered to your door. So why, then, do we feel so empty [空落落] inside?

Anxiety is as pervasive as the air we breathe. A sense of suffocating heaviness clings to our bodies like a wet garment that cannot be removed. The most terrifying thing is the despondency [灰心]: not about any one thing in particular, but about everything. Work, marriage, children, the future… it all just leaves us feeling drained.

Is it my problem? Or has the world really changed?

I’ll make a stab at answering this.

Fighting corruption [反FB]? Absolutely correct, it was long overdue. Investigating arbitrary fees [清查S费]? Fine, rules needed to be established. Rectifying the property sector [整顿FDC]? That was necessary, someone had to prick the bubble eventually. Controlling the expression of public opinion? There also seems to be a case for that: there are all kinds of mad people out there and you can’t just let rumours fly all over the place [林子大了什么鸟都有，总不能让谣言满天飞].

Taken individually, each of these things makes sense. All are done “for your own good”.

So why, when they are all added together, does it feel so awful?

I thought about it for a long while. Basically—it’s as if all the trust has gone.

In the past, we believed that “when people are born, their nature is good” [”人之初，性本善”]. When we met a stranger, we would assume the best [先往好处想]. If we heard something, we would at least give it some credence [先信三分]. And now? Our default setting has become “human nature is bad”. Businesses must be cheating me, experts are duping me, policies are manipulating me and the people around me are definitely using me.

Bad vibes [戾气] have festered within society. Online, the slightest spark bursts into a conflagration. In face-to-face life, the slightest bump triggers an explosion. People no longer reason things out with one another, but fixate on their own standpoints. What they care about is no longer consensus, but winning and losing. Everyone sees themselves as a victim. Everyone believes that others owe them something.

But where exactly did things go wrong?

I’d like to blame some person, event or policy. Yet the more I mull it over, the more it seems that everyone is just doing their job. Officials are maintaining stability [维稳], entrepreneurs are making money, media organisations are chasing traffic and ordinary people are trying to survive. Who is at fault? It doesn’t seem like anyone is.

And yet, it also feels like no one can escape responsibility.

What is hardest to bear is this feeling of throwing a punch only for it to land on cotton wool [这种一拳打在棉花上的感觉]. You clearly perceive that something is wrong, but you cannot identify a concrete enemy. You want to issue a rallying cry [呐喊], but do not know to whom you should cry out.

It occurred to me later that, perhaps, the reason is actually quite simple.

We’ve grown old.

Even the youngest of those born in the 1980s are now thirty-five and the oldest are approaching fifty. We are no longer the youngsters who could play video games all night and still be bursting with energy the next day. Aches and pains have become routine, our medical reports grow heftier, our hair grows thinner and our stomachs grow larger.

We have collectively entered middle-age.

Physiologically, that is, but more so psychologically. Our hormones are retreating, our dopamine is diminishing and the filters through which we viewed the world are being stripped away, layer by layer. When we were young, we thought that “anything was possible”. Now we think that just staying alive is good enough. When we were young, we thought all the world was a stage. Now we think it is a cage.

Maybe, our surroundings have not actually changed. Judged by some measures, they have even improved. Perhaps what has changed is simply our bodily functioning and our state of mind.

It is like someone suffering from depression, to whom everything appears bleak and dim. It is not that the world has got dimmer, but that something is going wrong with his retina.

Even so, I still think back to that summer twenty [likely thirty] years ago.

Thrumming cicadas, ice lollies and the creak of an old electric fan turning to-and-fro. The news was playing on television, my parents were cooking in the kitchen and I lay belly-down on a bamboo mat doing my homework, wondering with whom I could play football the next day.

It never occurred to me then that those days would disappear, never to return.

Now, Premier Zhu [Z相] and the Elder are gone, the figures of that era facing their final curtain, one after another. Our generation, meanwhile, has been pushed from the audience and into the centre of the stage. We are even beginning to disappear behind that curtain ourselves.

Sometimes, I genuinely wish that all of this were nothing more than a long dream. I could awake to find myself still sprawled on the bamboo mat, the fan still turning, my parents calling me to come and eat and that familiar voice [Jiang, the Elder’s] still intoning from the television: “The Chinese people are invincible!”

But I know that this is not a dream.

A dream would not hurt this much.

So just let things rest.

Let go of those obsessions, abandon those illusions and lower expectations as far as they will go. Eat well, sleep properly and focus on living a good life. Stop asking what it all means, stop searching for answers and stop expecting the world to return to the way it once was.

Simply being able to focus on living a good life has itself become a wild hope.

Farewell, Premier Zhu.

And may we ourselves be granted a little more peaceful sleep within this dream.

(Even after repeatedly cutting and revising a commemorative article like this, I still won’t be able to publish it. Ha.)

1. The “minefields” and “tofu dregs” quotations refer to two separate remarks made by Zhu Rongji in 1998. Zhu invoked the idea of having to “cross minefields” at a news conference while defending himself against accusations of being “China’s Gorbachev” while he was pushing through a series of highly controversial SOE and government reforms and restructurings. The “tofu-dreg construction project” phrase was used on an inspection to denounce building standards for the Jiujiang dyke on the Yangtze, which burst during floods that summer.

2. A common nickname for Jiang Zemin, which originated from how he described himself when berating Hong Kong journalists at a press conference in 2000, saying that their apparently naïve questioning left him “worried on their behalf”.