China Change » The Collapse of Yesterday’s World – A Chinese Millennial Journalist’s Chronicle of the ‘Reform and Opening Up’ That Never Was, Part One

The Collapse of Yesterday’s World – A Chinese Millennial Journalist’s Chronicle of the ‘Reform and Opening Up’ That Never Was, Part One

Jia Jia, October 7, 2025

Truman Capote once said, “… one person’s story can be the story of his time.” This is one such account. Now based in Tokyo, Jia Jia (贾葭) is a Chinese journalist, columnist, and editor who worked at several prominent publications in China and Hong Kong, including Oriental Outlook (瞭望东方周刊), Phoenix Weekly (凤凰周刊), GQ Chinese Edition, iSun Affairs (陽光時務), and Initium Media (端傳媒) during a vibrant period for journalism. Over time, however, the environment for journalism grew increasingly bleak to the point that he finally left the country. We hope Jia Jia’s testimony offers valuable insights for those seeking to understand China’s trajectory over the past four decades. — The Editors

On August 23, 2022, I sat in a café on the coast of Tokyo Bay, watching a few white cargo ships slowly pass by on the blue sea outside the window. A few kids were skateboarding by the sea, and tourists were taking photos with their phones. It was just another ordinary afternoon. At that same moment, my phone buzzed with news from Chongqing where the temperature had reached 43 degrees Celsius, and residents were lining up to get their nucleic acid tests in the blazing heat and wildfire smoke cloaking the city.

I felt a slight sense of relief. I remembered a friend in Shenzhen who had undergone over 300 tests since the beginning of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Shenzhen, this southern Chinese metropolis bordering Hong Kong, had been crowned by netizens as the “capital of nucleic acid tests.” I had just left that city 10 months ago. I had done a nucleic acid test when I left Shenzhen and another when I landed in Tokyo — only twice. Thinking of those I knew who had to have a swab stuck in their mouths every 24 hours, I felt lucky.

Of course, the situation in Tokyo was not entirely optimistic either. Around that time, the number of daily infections had exceeded 20,000, but life went on largely as usual. On July 31, I started to develop a fever, but was free of symptoms after ten days.

If I had still been living in Shenzhen, not only me, but because of me, hundreds of my neighbors would have been forced into a quarantine center, and my entire community and the surrounding area would have been marked as “high-risk,” and everyone in Nanshan District, home to 1.35 million people, would have had to undergo an extra nucleic acid test.

On the afternoon of November 15, 2021, I boarded a plane for Tokyo. Looking down from the right side window, I could see Hong Kong’s Lau Fau Shan and Wetland Park, lush and green in the southern winter. The weather was excellent, and I could vaguely make out the skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island. I leaned against the window, staring below blankly until the plane ascended above the clouds. Although I had bid farewell to Hong Kong countless times in my heart, this time was the saddest.

I briefly worked in Hong Kong when I was 31. Though I was only there a short time, it was during this time, in this magical city, that I felt truly matured — I learned to be more courageous, confident, and loving. Hong Kong became the origin point of my life, constantly reminding me what freedom feels like. But after 2019, the Hong Kong of my memory was dead.

In my backpack, I have several thumb-sized pieces of broken glass. They are from August 31, 2019, when protesters and police clashed violently at Mong Kok MTR station, shattering windows at the station. Passing by I picked up a few pieces, some still stained with blood, as a memento of that evening.

The plane flew northeast, over mountains and rivers, and out of mainland China between the coastlines of Hangzhou and Wenzhou. I just stared blankly. I had been to Japan many times before, but this time my feelings were different. During the days of Covid self-quarantine, there was something I mulled over countless times: I wanted to leave this country — China.

Over these past few years, the world I had built up for myself has been in a progressive state of collapse. The values and beliefs I had established in my youth were being severely challenged and questioned. If it were 2002 — twenty years ago — I might have wondered whether something was wrong with me. Now, being in my forties, I am certain beyond a doubt that it is not my fault. It is the China behind me that has completely changed. It is precisely due to the immense changes in China over these past few years that I, along with many of my peers, have become “enemies of the homeland.”

1. Mickey Mouse and Coca-Cola

I was born in a small town at the foot of Mount Hua, one of China’s “Five Great Mountains,” located just 120 kilometers from the ancient capital of Xi’an, in Shaanxi province, the seat of the prosperous eras of the Han and Tang dynasties. While Xi’an is a city that readily fills Chinese people with pride, compared to Shanghai and Beijing, it is extremely parochial. Locals indulge themselves in the glories of a distant past and generally lack a modern openness in their mindset.

Even so, when I think back to my childhood, I still feel it was a golden era worth recording. At that time, not many families owned a television. Every weekend, I would watch cartoons with a group of friends, spending about fifteen minutes at a time. Although it was a black-and-white TV, and we didn’t know what color Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were, we still enjoyed those fifteen minutes immensely. It was the only thing to look forward to after six days of schoolwork. Back then in the 1980s, China still had a six-day workweek.

Of course, I didn’t know at the time that these were Disney cartoons made over sixty years ago. China’s timeline was not synchronized with the world’s. When Disney released this cartoon, Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China, had just passed away, and China was still under the rule of the Beiyang warlord government. After this cartoon, there would be MGM’s “Tom and Jerry,” a cartoon made during World War II that I still occasionally rewatch.

I still vividly remember Sunday, March 22, 1992. My friends and I had waited six days to watch “Tom and Jerry” on TV, but instead, the broadcast showed a live launch of the Long March 2 rocket. Why do I remember it so clearly? Because the rocket launch failed. It didn’t take off; there was a huge yellow smoke coming from the base of the rocket, and then the TV signal was cut off. That might have been the only time the Chinese public witnessed a rocket launch failure.

Besides American cartoons, there were also Japanese anime series like “Ikkyū-san,” “Astro Boy,” and “Doraemon,” which are still fresh in my memory. Many years ago, when I first strolled around Kyoto, I found the area outside Daitoku-ji Temple particularly familiar, as if I had been there before. It turned out that this was the temple where Ikkyū resided. Additionally, Japanese electronics were especially popular, and owning a Hitachi or Toshiba TV was a big deal.

The 1980s were also a honeymoon period for China and Japan. In 1984, a famous Japanese TV series, Akai Giwaku, aired in mainland China, starring actress Momoe Yamaguchi. The clothes she wore in the show, known as “Sachiko sweaters,” became a huge fashion trend in China at that time. My father adored Momoe Yamaguchi. When I was a child, he used to joke with me about marrying a Japanese wife when I grew up.

For most Chinese people, Akai Giwaku might have been their first introduction to the concept of blood types. During its broadcast, some people even committed suicide because the storyline was too heartbreaking. What shocked Chinese audiences the most was that in their minds, Japan, a nation defeated in war, had such advanced household items like flush toilets, gas stoves, and televisions in the 1970s. The cities were bustling with traffic, and skyscrapers were everywhere.

For my generation, the United States and Japan represented a high standard of living: comfortable, developed, and filled with fun and interesting cultural products. When a friend of my father’s brought me a ballpoint pen from the U.S. — in fact a very ordinary pen that could be bought anywhere there — my classmates envied me for a long time. “Imported” meant high quality, durability, and excellence, leading us to believe that everything from abroad (mostly the U.S., Japan, and a few other developed countries) was superior.

In 1992, a red Ferrari car with the license plate Beijing A00001 was parked in Tiananmen Square. A giant photograph of this car and its owner, Li Xiaohua, was once displayed at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and Lyon Square. The caption below read: “A challenger from red capitalism.” This was the first time Chinese people became aware of the Ferrari brand. Three years later, the first Carrefour supermarket opened in Beijing’s Chaoyang District.

Take Coca-Cola for another example. It first appeared in my childhood as a craved reward, anything but a common beverage. When I got good grades, my father would buy me a bottle of Coke, and the empty glass bottle had to be returned to the store. That sweet and tangy taste seemed to linger on my tongue for days, so much so that in the first few years after graduating college and earning my own money, I drank Coke every day to “reward” myself.

During the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, a boy named Xue Xiao was trapped in the rubble for 80 hours. When rescuers finally dug him out, his first words were: “I want a Coke, a cold one.” This boy, known as the “Coke Boy,” joined Coca-Cola China after graduating from university, and is now the curator of the Chengdu Coca-Cola Museum.

I, along with the generation of younger Chinese that followed, grew up in this atmosphere. The first KFC restaurant in Beijing opened in 1987, and a young couple held their wedding at the Qianmen KFC on the south side of the Tiananmen Square. At that time, a KFC restaurant symbolized fashion, expense, deliciousness, and prestige. After that, the first McDonald’s restaurant also opened in Beijing, and children started having their birthdays at McDonald’s. Looking back at it now, these things seem unbelievable.

Over the first half of the 1980s, a series titled “Going to the World” (《走向世界丛书》) was published in China by a minor publishing house. The publisher selected dozens of works written by late Qing Dynasty intellectuals from over 100 years ago about their experiences of the Western world, and it was hailed as the second time that China opened its eyes to observe the rest of the world after the country being shut in for much of the intervening century. I had read several books in this series during my college years. In 2005, when I interviewed its chief editor Zhong Shuhe, he reminisced about the 1980s intellectuals’ longing for the outside world and their thirst for Western civilization.

In 1988, a documentary titled “River Elegy” (《河殇》) aired on China Central Television and caused quite a stir across society. It explored various traditional Chinese cultural symbols, arguing that China was overburdened by its traditional culture and that the civilization of “yellow earth” should learn from and embrace the “blue civilization” of the maritime West. I was too young to understand it then, but I met Su Xiaokang (苏晓康), the chief writer of the documentary, in Taipei in 2008, I excitedly told him how I was definitely of the “River Elegy generation” that whole-heartedly embraces the “blue civilization.”

In 1990, China hosted the Asian Games for the first time, and my father bought a color TV for it. To this day I still remember the theme song, as do many other Chinese: “Guests from four seas meet, friends are made across five continents.” The new hotel in the Asian Games Village was named “Five Continents Hotel.” That was then, but now is now.

As the country began to open its doors to the rest of the world, a university student named Li Yang (李阳) at the more remote Lanzhou University invented a method for quickly learning spoken English, which he called “Crazy English.” Within a few years, it became very popular in China. In 1993, Li Yang served as an interpreter for a member of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, becoming a national celebrity. For some time, it seemed that everyone in China was learning English.

When I was in middle school in the 1990s, our English teacher often played the audio of foreign movies to help us practice listening. I remember listening to the lines of “Roman Holiday,” “Casablanca,” and “Braveheart” countless times. Our supplementary material for English class was news reports from the Associated Press. My English teacher was someone who had experienced the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and would constantly advise us to learn English well so we could go abroad in the future.

As such, I grew up in a general atmosphere that was critical of China and looked up to the West, though as a youngster, I was more bewildered than anything else. Both the public and the government were dissatisfied with China’s current state. In middle school, nearly all of our Political Thought textbooks quoted Deng Xiaoping’s remarks on learning from the West. It was a consensus between the government and the people that China needed to learn from the West and open up to the outside world.

Except for the 1989 student democracy movement where there was no consensus between the people and the government. Due to the government’s closely-guarded silence on the matter over the years, I only heard first-hand accounts of the Tiananmen massacre during my college years in Nanjing. I started using the internet in 1997, and by 1998 I had discovered many overseas news and academic websites. One such website was “64memo,” which contained a vast collection of photos and information about June 4th. The shock I felt at the time was beyond words.

Back then, China’s Great Firewall (GFW) had not yet been established, meaning we could freely access overseas websites. Besides information on the 1989 democracy movement, there were also Taiwanese government websites and sites run by Tibetan exiles. From them, I learned many things I had never known before, forcing me to re-examine what really happened in China during the 1980s, the era in which I grew up.

I had an epiphany not until many years later, after reading “Political Struggles in the Era of Reform” (《改革年代的政治斗争》) by Yang Jisheng (杨继绳), a renowned journalist who once worked for Xinhua News Agency. It turned out that the coin had a flip side: the “Campaign to Eliminate Spiritual Pollution” in 1983 and the “Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign” in 1986, among others, had merely been the results of the political power balance between Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun (陈云), another Communist Party elder. Today people nostalgically refer to the 1980s as the “golden age,” but in fact it was nothing more than fleeting moments of sunshine in an otherwise overcast sky.

Many truths only became clear to me after I went to university. I am very grateful to the professors who reminisced about the past in their lectures. Some of these elderly scholars had lived through the war with Japan, the Chinese Civil War, the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution. Some had experienced the events of the 1989 massacre. Back then, university classrooms were not yet equipped with cameras and recording devices, and there were no party-assigned informants among the students. Teachers could speak freely about historical events. Not anymore.

When President Clinton visited China in July 1998, his first stop was Xi’an. He was the first American president to visit China following the Tiananmen Massacre. I remember clearly that an official from Xi’an solemnly handed Clinton a key, and the south gate of the ancient capital slowly opened. It was a very symbolic moment, representing how ancient China was once again opening its doors to the outside world with the United States at the forefront.

Just how ancient was China at that time? The first time I took a train out of the province was in the fall of 1998 when I went to university, two months after Clinton’s visit. The train departed from Xi’an at 5 p.m. and would arrive at Sanmenxia—a city on the border between Henan and Shaanxi provinces — around 11 p.m. At this point, the train’s PA system blared out, “Comrade passengers, the train has now entered Henan province. Please take care of your belongings.” The passengers understood that it was a warning against thieving Henanese. Such blatant regional discrimination was something we were completely unaware of while living in it. Many similar instances served as constant reminders that this country was still in a pre-modern state.

During my time at university, the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia was bombed. I found myself among the crowds of protestors, naively contemplating China’s future. Later, the collision between a Chinese fighter jet and an American reconnaissance aircraft didn’t have a significant impact on the recently resumed Sino-American relations following the bombing. China continued intense WTO negotiations with the United States. It took many years and the trade and tariff negotiations under Trump for Americans to understand the implications of China’s accession to the WTO and to start reflecting on the China policy missteps of the past forty years.

For my generation, the first twenty years of our lives were defined by the term “reform and opening up.” Deng Xiaoping said that we must adhere to this direction for 100 years without wavering. This made us firmly believe that such days would accompany us throughout our lives. In spite of the ups and downs in the twenty years leading up to China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, the overall trajectory seemed headed towards greater openness. This was my general understanding of China during my adolescence. At the time, all these factors filled us with confidence in China’s future.