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

Li Jianxiong is convinced he has lived two lives. His first began in 1984, when he was born to impoverished farmers in China’s Henan province. Ambitious and daring, he took full advantage of the new economic reality that unfolded after the cataclysms of the Mao years. By 2017, he had secured a family, a house in Beijing and a reputation as one of China’s most talented young marketing men. His success, however, came at a cost. By then, 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. While managing an all-consuming media crisis for his employer, a major tutoring company, he developed insomnia, heart palpitations and a severe rash that doctors attributed to a flagging immune system. He wondered more than once whether he might actually work himself to death.

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.

In April 2021, nine months after he returned to Beijing, 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”.

Li was just eight years old in 1992, when the Communist leader Deng Xiaoping took a tour of southern China and enjoined cadres and business leaders to pursue growth “as fast as possible”. The visit reignited the “reform and opening up” policy that had stalled after the military cracked down on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. By the time Li entered high school in 2001, more than 100 million people from the countryside, including Li’s elder sister, had left their villages for China’s coastal cities. “In our generation, those born in the 1970s and 1980s, we were in sync with reform and opening up,” Li told me. “Everyone was fundamentally driven to develop rapidly.”

Deng’s reforms, which privileged high-skilled jobs in science and technology, offered new opportunities in higher education, though these could be difficult to come by. For students in Henan, the odds of attending a top university in Beijing were slim. According to one 2013 report, just three out of every 10,000 people who took the college-entrance exam, known as the gaokao, made the cut. But Li availed himself of a new system that allowed him to transfer from a village primary school to the top high school in the nearby city of Xinyang. Every day, he woke up at 5.30am and studied maths and Chinese literature until 11pm. He failed the gaokao on his first attempt, but he begged his parents to let him try again. The next year, Li earned one of the top scores in his province.

Li eventually attended the prestigious Peking University, where he planned to be a journalist. By the time he graduated, in 2008, the global economy was in recession. The newspaper he joined laid him off, and the resulting financial pressure caused him to abandon journalism for a public relations job at a new online fashion retailer. Within two years, he was leading the company’s PR strategy. In 2009, Li married his high-school sweetheart, Rose. They welcomed their first child not long after. When Rose moved into their apartment in Zhongguancun, the Beijing tech district known as China’s Silicon Valley, she was proud to see Li’s ads on subways and buses in the area. Word of Li’s marketing genius got around, and he was soon fielding offers from nearly every major Chinese e-commerce company. At the time, China was in the throes of “education fever”, as parents of a burgeoning middle class looked for any advantage that would fast-track their kids up the pipeline of social mobility. A fashionable startup called TAL Education, which offered private tutoring to kids from kindergarten to high school, promised to do just that. When the company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010, it became emblematic of China’s love affair with American capitalism. Li joined the company shortly after, and in the next seven years, it grew from 200 full-time employees to 28,000.

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.”

By 2016, TAL was one of China’s largest education companies, with more than 300 training centres nationwide. Yet trouble was on the horizon. In November of that year, a newspaper in Hangzhou published a lengthy exposé that cast TAL’s training centres as hellscapes of restless parents and overworked preteens. Party-run newspapers accused tutoring agencies of stoking the “collective anxieties of the middle class”. Months later, local authorities halted enrolments at TAL branches in Hangzhou, Wuhan and Chengdu. In less than a decade, the private-tutoring industry had spawned an education arms race, a scramble for better test scores that tormented families and enriched TAL. As Li told me, “Everyone put in so much time and money, and in the end, all it did was raise everyone’s scores and study time.”

The public backlash from the Hangzhou article broke through the facade of control that had long been a part of Li’s professional image. But 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 frayed easily. Li told me that he was in denial: “I was young, right? As young people, 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’s crisis reached its nadir at a time when many Chinese were losing faith in the promises of China’s meritocracy. From delivery workers trapped in the punishing gig economy, to factory labourers struggling with impossible production timelines, to overburdened tech executives, everyone was working exceedingly hard for a better future that never seemed to arrive. In the mid-2010s, Xiang Biao, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, in Halle, Germany, and an expert on contemporary Chinese society, compared Chinese people to hummingbirds, who must beat their wings very fast merely to hover in place. “‘Suspension’ was a word I used to describe the situation before the Covid lockdowns,” Xiang told me, “when the economy was still going strong and people still had hope. They would think: ‘Oh, I can’t afford to deal with my health. I just have to earn more money, then once I have enough all my problems will disappear.’”

Suspension, or xuanfu, refers to the deferral of life’s problems – loneliness, estranged families, personal health, political rights – to pursue money in the now. And as the pandemic approached, many middle- and upper-class Chinese who had satisfied their basic material needs were starting to question the point of it all. A 2019 video in which Xiang introduced the idea of suspension went viral, garnering 30m views in the first two weeks. Online discussions featured talk of “996 work culture”, “lying flat” – the rejection of achievement culture and the embrace of idleness – and “involution”, which referred to a system that absorbed ever more effort without a payout.

As the reckoning unfolded, the Communist party offered its own story. In the official telling, western-style capitalism had run its course, leaving inequality, decadence and corruption in its wake. Private tutoring was held up as one example of everything that had gone wrong. Backed by western financiers, it had turned China’s vaunted ladder of social mobility into a pay-to-play system. In 2021, Xi Jinping called the £100bn industry “a stubborn malady”, and months later the Communist party nearly wiped it out by forcing firms to register as nonprofits. Industry leaders declared the “end of an era”, and companies such as TAL lost 70% of their stock value in a day.

The party’s assault on tutoring was part of a sweeping campaign known as “common prosperity”. This new policy aimed to accelerate the transition from a society burnt out by capitalist excess to a new era of tamed markets and a people who would draw strength from party ideology and cultural tradition. But China’s weak civil society meant that the government had limited tools beyond crackdowns and mass campaigns to drive renewal. Billionaires and tech monopolies were dragged through the mud, but the policies didn’t do much to help Chinese workers and small businesses who had lost incomes during the worst of the pandemic lockdowns. By the time the Covid crisis ended, the economy had slowed to such an extent that official odes to “common prosperity” began to sound tone deaf. The phrase nearly evaporated from policy documents. Xi Jinping’s “new deal” left many disappointed and others bracing for more disruption.

Li resigned from TAL in December 2018. Around the same time, he’d developed the idea of leaving China for the US, alone. Early in the new year, he applied for a fellowship to Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute and received an offer four months later. Soon, Rose became pregnant with their second child, but Li still resolved to go.

Li’s family thought he had lost his head. “You’ve got young kids and elderly parents at home. How can you go so far away with no income and no idea when you’ll be back?” Rose recalls his father asking, though it seemed clear that she had similar questions. Li’s father never fully approved, though Rose eventually allowed him to leave. On the day she drove Li to the airport, she was three months pregnant and recovering from a severe case of morning sickness. “Jianxiong is the type of person who, once he’s focused on something, he gives it his all,” Rose told me with weary acceptance. “He doesn’t think much about things like, ‘Oh, my wife is several months pregnant; I should check in on her more.’”

The strangeness of Li’s adventure went beyond the personal: he was embarking on a journey into the centre of western capitalism – at a time when Donald Trump was president and million-dollar sales of crypto art dominated headlines – to find a spiritual elixir to save Chinese souls. Yet Li was also following a well-trodden path. A century ago, Lu Xun found inspiration in western literature to help launch a cultural movement that reinvented China. Westerners, too – whether it was the Beats of the 1950s or Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love – have regularly looked to the east in their own hope for spiritual renewal. “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.

When the pandemic reached New York in the spring of 2020, Li decided to return to Beijing. Possessed of a newfound resolve, he launched Heartify in April 2021 with a single format, which he called the life-story salon. He borrowed the concept from Alcoholics Anonymous – which was, perhaps, an unlikely inspiration for a culture that still values saving face, or mianzi, over revealing personal vulnerabilities. Yet Li says that surmounting this barrier was key to his own recovery. “I think I was healed through stories,” he once said. During the initial session, he planned for three female volunteers – a former journalist, an influencer and a cosmetologist – to spend 15 minutes sharing their personal growth journeys. But after the women finished, other salon attendees felt compelled to share. The spontaneous outpouring convinced Li that he’d discovered something real and overlooked.

The sessions continued every week until the end of 2021, when Li moved Heartify online in response to new Covid outbreaks. As lockdowns trapped hundreds of millions in their homes and left about 80 million jobless, Li’s online salons ballooned in popularity. Soon each of his two-hour live sessions were attended by thousands of people – sometimes as many as 15,000 – even though Li did no promotions beyond a modest WeChat channel.

Heartify is not a large community by Chinese standards, but its modesty is part of the point. The company is at the vanguard of a spontaneous movement in China toward small-scale, commercial and communal “spaces”, or kongjian. In a society where large congregations, digital forums and nonprofits are tightly regulated by the government, under the suspicion that they might propagate harmful ideologies, the kongjian absorbs some of the communitarian needs of a middle class, or “third places”, that Li had found so lacking. In China, it is from the cafe, the yoga studio or the dance therapy class – under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights dancing to Mandopop rhythms – that conversations flow most freely, stories ricochet and a shared reality can be forged.

George Hu, the president of Shanghai International Mental Health Association, told me that Heartify was part of a wave of mental health services that emerged from the pandemic. “Covid was this huge slap upside the head,” Hu told me. People began to think about “whether the way that they approached their lives would give the outcomes that they wanted”. Calls to the hotline of Jiandan Xinli – literally “easy psychology” – one of China’s leading online psychological counselling providers, have increased by 25% a year on average, amid “urgent demand from the public”. Private investments are pouring into mental health apps and startups. Companies are investing in employee assistance programmes. On social media, hashtags related to managing neihao, a neologism referring to fruitless mental exertion, have reached up to 950m hits.

Not everyone is impressed with Li’s success. When I asked a Beijing education entrepreneur what she thought about Heartify, she quickly dismissed it: “A charismatic middle-aged man preaching self-help? We’ve seen this play out before.” And for all his fixation on cultivating relationships, Li has sometimes put his own in jeopardy. When he returned from the US, Rose told me, his father was confused about his new project. “I don’t even know how to explain what you do to my neighbours!” he would say. Rose, for her part, told me that Li had become more attentive with his children since he returned. Yet there were still signs that Li’s spiritual development was rather less than complete. When Rose refused to iron his clothes one day, Li told her: “You know, ironing my clothes is part of your practice too.”

It is harder to doubt Li’s devotion to his clients. He says he has not made any money from Heartify, and that most of the proceeds go to paying his instructors. And despite numerous requests to expand his venture to Guangzhou, Shanghai and even New York, he has been meticulous about finding the right people to carry on his work. During classes, Li was mostly a quiet observer, not the towering evangelist one often finds in such settings. Even his vatic speaking style seems less calculated than it does the quirk of a man trying to describe, in his new self-help patois, the whiplash of living through three breathless decades.

Last September, I sat in on one of Li’s life-story sessions, which took place on the campus of Peking University. The topic was to “share a story about your name”. Twenty or so participants sat in a circle, with their shoes off and a box of tissues in the centre. Most of Li’s clients, including those in this session, were women, ranging from fresh college graduates to people in their 60s.

A chatty young woman in a silky Tang-style suit kicked off the session. The woman introduced herself as Jing, and told us that her name, which meant “surprise”, was often misspelled as the word for “competition”. Since she was young, she’d been frustrated that her name never sounded as feminine as she’d wanted it to. While still telling her story, Jing began to cry unexpectedly. Nothing in her story had hinted at such distress. The Heartify volunteers handed her tissues, and when she’d caught her breath, Jing explained that she’d been swept up by unwelcome memories of being an elder sister. In traditional Chinese households, women and elder siblings are expected to sacrifice their personal ambition for parents and younger siblings, and so the eldest sister carries a dual burden.

No one replied to Jing’s disclosure. Li has imposed strict rules, including a ban on commenting after someone’s story, to make it easier for people to share without fear of judgment. Yet Jing’s story seemed to alter the nengliang, the energy, of the room. A sullen-looking woman who sat across from Jing revealed her own personal troubles in a gradual digression from the prompt. She was also an elder sister, as well as a mother of a child in elementary school. With her husband away on a work trip, and her kids getting out of school at noon each day, she was at her wits’ end. She had no choice but to leave her child at a friend’s house to attend the session. “My husband’s even worse,” another woman interjected. She was attempting to offer commiseration, but caught herself, remembering the no-comment rule. Like Li’s very first salon, a quiet momentum had taken hold.

There was something underwhelming about Heartify’s activities: I was surprised at how many of the activities resembled childhood games and corporate icebreakers which, in the west, would likely not have been more enticing than a hot yoga class. At one point last autumn, I joined a drama therapy class where the instructor led us through a game of tag, musical chairs and a bean bag toss, all while requiring us to impersonate animals. Li, the former tech savant, bleated like a sheep and growled like a wolf.

Yet even though some younger participants acknowledged that they, too, were disappointed, many other Heartify customers, especially the older ones, reported near-spiritual conversions. At the dance class, Li told me that “very few Chinese have ever done anything like this, to really get in touch with their bodies”. While many of Li’s clients arrived to his classes wary, with their guard up, they also seemed most willing to shed their defences at the faintest invitation. They were not searching for sophistication, but something more prosaic: a chance to exit their societal roles – be it the colleague, the mother, the elder sister – and a space to simply, and unabashedly, be.

One woman I met in a dance class last summer, who was in her mid-30s, visited Heartify after recovering from a severe bout of depression. When I spoke to her again a few months later, she had become a Heartify volunteer. The dance instructor, she said, had made her feel seen in a way that she’d rarely felt in her previous life as a broadcast journalist. After class one night, she told me, she dreamed about confronting someone who had belittled her. She felt as though her subconscious had started to “heal old wounds”.

The community component seemed critical to Heartify’s success, which explained the popularity of Li’s life story sessions. A volunteer named Bingyu told me that her life had felt untethered before Heartify, as though it were “a piece of grass, drifting without roots”. After a particularly probing sharing session, which Li had organised at a farmhouse last summer, Bingyu has felt far more stable and confident, enough that she’d finally asserted her boundaries against the entreaties of a salesman who worked at a cosmetic store she regularly visited. “Outwardly, I hadn’t changed at all,” she told me. “But somehow, the feeling inside was different.”

After I watched the life-sharing salon with Li, we picked up the yellow mats and returned the chairs and desks to the centre of the room, so that they would be ready to welcome the rush of fresh student strivers in the days ahead. As the night-schoolers filed out of the basement, conversations flowed more freely. Near the exit, one of the older female participants asked Li if she could become a Heartify volunteer. They exchanged numbers. I hung back with Li as he turned off the lights and we stepped out into the autumn air.

It had rained during class, and outside the streets glistened with the orange hue of headlights and street lamps. As I waited for my cab, I thought about the limits and possibilities of this age of personal exploration. Across my interviews with Li and the Heartify burnouts, I didn’t hear one person mention a desire for a greater say in politics. The sense of dislocation that, in the west, might find expression through a nativist, populist politics, appeared to manifest differently here, where political paths are foreclosed by Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism. The logic was described to me by a Shanghai resident in her late 20s, who had spent time in the US after enduring a two-month Covid lockdown. “Once you experience that amount of loss of freedom, you think about why,” she said. “Then you decide, OK, is it something that can change? No? OK, well – can I change?”

People’s values and priorities are shifting. “The suspension mentality is definitely changing,” Xiang told me. “The problem of the here and now has become heavier and heavier.” Since the pandemic, there has been a wave of emigration. More women critical of China’s patriarchal system have set off a boom in the market for translated feminist works. Last summer, on a trip to the mountains of Wudang, one of the birthplaces of Taoism, I saw temples teeming with young Chinese eagerly studying tai chi and yangsheng, the art of bodily wellbeing. The pandemic seemed to have awoken many Chinese to the realisation that, for several years now, they had been living a sort of lie: a life of scarcity in an age of abundance. Now was the time for self-correction. The search has just begun.