The end of Chinese modesty

What do China's Gen-Z Olympian athletes mean for our future

[This is a free essay and the comment section is open to all.]

I had a debilitating fever (twice this year already!) over the weekend so I didn’t post anything last week. I was also planning to take a vacation with some of my friends to Georgia (the country), which would be my first real vacation in 5 years. It would be an occasion for me to take it easy and put my work and life on a more normalized path. So in my hazy fever-stricken mind, I was genuinely worried that catching this fever now, of all time, would derail this long-needed vacation. All I could do was to have some faith in myself and assume it would happen, but stand ready to cut loss and ditch this vacation should my fever continue by the time of the flight.

Fortunately, I recovered well enough to catch my Tuesday flight, stopping over for half a day at Urumqi (first time too!) and finally arrived in Georgia.

It’s a very interesting country, unique, leaving a disproportionately larger footprint on the world relative to its actual size. I am glad I did make it, and I could write a whole travelogue about it. But I am afraid it won’t fit the style of this newsletter. But, as you all know, undecided matters of this newsletter can be determined by You the Readers. I will write about my experience here if I gather 100 Yes votes.

What I originally planned to write last week was about the Paris Olympics.

As I mentioned in this newsletter’s intro, a key area that I focus on is the narratives and discourses in today’s China: how people talk, how people think, how they express themselves, what do they not express, and why.

Why do these things matter? Because they are clues to the collective psyche of our time. For the business owners and managers among you, these provide clues to understanding the consumers or the counter-parties you are dealing with. For investors, these give you inspiration on which sectors will trend up at the expense of which. For strategic planners and analysts, the people and their ideas serve as the bedrock upon which changes in social, political, and even geopolitical structures ultimately take shape.

And what better window to peep into current state of China’s collective psyche than a once-every-four-year mass global event like the Olympics?

Our new generation of “cool” athletes

The Chinese delegation to the Paris Olympics is marked by one thing: a fresh breed of young athletes born in the new millennium. In China, we call them “零零后 Post-00s”. And this year’s Olympics is when the “Post-00s” shine. They not only shine in their arenas but also shine in the post-game interviews, with their cool and self-confident expression remarkably different from the self-effacing style of the older generations.

Take Zheng Qinwen, China’s first gold Olympian medallist in tennis singles for example. After her victory, when a journalist asked her about what she thought about the nickname “Queen Wen” that had gone viral. She responded:

我非常同意这个说法。可能在这之前我还会谦虚一下，别那么说了吧。但是在拿到这个冠军之后。。。实至名归。

I'm in complete agreement with this statement. Before, I might have been modest and said, "Oh, don't say that." But after winning this championship... I’d say it's well-deserved.

It might not mean much to you, but anyone raised in the Chinese culture (or East Asian culture for that matter) knows that it’s not common to see public figures talking like this. We have all been taught to be modest, to hide what you are good at, to say nice things only about others, never about yourselves, and to always mentally prepare for the fact that there will always be people better than you.

So to see our champions talking in this way is nothing short of remarkable. What’s more interesting, their expressions drew wide and wild acclaim from China’s domestic audiences, showing it’s not just about how individual champions talk about things, but about what our society has been in agreement with.

And it’s not just one individual case, but a group phenomenon. You can also refer to the following article by my colleague

Amber Zhang

on many other new, refreshing, laid-back and more self-confident images our athletes have projected onto the world.

What the 2024 Paris Olympics reveal about the changing values of Chinese athletes and society

Perhaps topping all of these “new era” attitude is the swimming champion and world-record-setter, the 20-year-old Pan Zhanle.

Pan Zhanle reset the world record in 100m freestyle swimming to a shocking 46.40s this time. Later, in the 400m medley relay match, Pan was also the decisive last leg dethroning America’s 4-decade monopoly on this gold medal.

But instead of roaring congratulations, Pan’s success has been overshadowed by unfounded suspicions, even though in this Olympics much more intense testing has been applied to the China team. Australian Olympian Brett Hawke openly questioned the legitimacy of Pan Zhanle’s win, claiming it is ‘not humanly possible’ to beat such a strong field by a full body length.

When a journalist asked how he looks at those doubts about him, here is his answer:

我不看他们对我的质疑。他们达不到是他们的事。我们能达到，就证明我们厉害。针对我们的兴奋剂检测那么多次，确实影响到我们了。但是我们是最干净的，是最清白的，所以我们才能拿冠军。

I don’t look at their doubts about me. It's their problem if they can't achieve it. If we can, it proves we're strong. We've been tested for doping so many times, and it did affect us. But we're the cleanest and purest, that’s how we won the championship.

Another interview with CGTN is even more revealing (you can watch the video clip yourself here):

Interviewer: Hawke said from a scientific perspective, it’s not “humanly possible”. What do you think?

Pan: I think he said it well. It would be better if he said it more often, to mislead the Westerners, so that we can rise higher (and make more progress.)

Interviewer: But he said it’s not “humanly possible”. He said it’s not possible for humans, not just for the athletes he is familiar with.

Pan: Since he said that, it shows that he still limits himself. He did not think out of the box.

Interviewer: What do you mean by “the box”

Pan: The box is set for the people. People set a box for themselves. You just have to ignore it.

Interviewer: Do such comments affect you?

Pan: It actually helps me. All the encouragements as well as the remarks belittling me can be turned into my motivation.

Pan’s coolness in answering all of those questions is remarkable. Also, notice there is nothing about “racial discrimination”, or whattaboutism, or anything about Chinese people’s “feelings being hurt”. A quiet, yet sure sense of strength is undeniable. It’s just pure winner’s mentality.

Pan represents the crème de la crème of China’s Post-00s. At this moment, they are just kids. (The golden child of diving, Quan Hongchan, is only 17 years old.) But 10-20 years later, they will become leaders, managers, diplomats, and colonels that you will be dealing with. It might be time for you to ponder what your future counterparty (or competitor, or adversary, or partner, or friend) will look like.

In a way, Pan’s case can also be a good mirror image for America’s perenial concern of whether China wants to supplant the US to be the world’s No. 1 power. I believe if someone with Pan’s way of looking at the world is to answer this question, this will roughly be the answer:

Truth is, we don’t really care. Your type of thinking is so 20th century. We just want to be better versions of ourselves. We are winning our own game. Don’t limit yourself in your imagination of what great power dynamics can be. And if in the process we happen to supplant anyone, we will not feign modesty. If someone just can’t allow us to win and corner us to a fight, then so be it.

But we are not always like this.

The unfortunate bad press for Pan, despite of the fact that he has achieved so much, came because historically, Chinese swimming teams did have a bad history with doping scandals. And that essentially stemmed from the self-confidence problem of the previous generations: we wanted to be the best in the world so much, and we wanted to be respected so much, but in order to achieve that, fair game was sacrificed.

This also points to one of the key difficulties in understanding China that I talked about many times: because China’s modernization has happened so fast, too many very different generations are crammed into the space of less than a century. For example, my grandparents’ generation was born in a countryside whose cultural contours were not much different from the Qing Dynasty’s peasantry. my parents’ generation was born into Maoist poverty. My generation was arguably the nexus between the generations older and younger, and we sort-of have a taste of everything. We played video games as children, but witnessed the attitudes and ways of life of all previous generations. Now is when the 00s, who grew up with smartphones and social media, came into adulthood. But the fact is, all of these very different generations co-exist under the same roof.

So it is easy to have a situation when our hardware has modernized, but our software, the collective psyche has only modernized partially. (That’s why I always advise patience when looking at China’s growth.)

Combine this “generation cramming” with my long-stated idea of a “Duo-China” problem, you could easily get lost if you take one idea of a particular niche segment as representing the whole of China. (I myself am running the risk of over-intrepreting what the crème de la crème of our teenagers mean for the future of China.)

Ultimately, as I recently explained at the YouTube channel of Mr. Marcel Munch, a German investing influencer, my deeper confidence for this country lies in our new generations. They are smarter than any previous generations. They are cool, and they are truly self-confident. And they can also win gold medals.

A truly self-confident generation, free of insecurity, will do great things for the world. For example, it’s hard to imagine when those “Post-00s” become mainstream, how can Chinese feelings be actually “hurt”. Cool people don’t get hurt. If we are in the wrong, we admit to it. If we are in the right, we speak it out and fight it back. No need for second-guessing. No space for gaslighting.

And I am just glad the Olympians among this cohort have set up some really good role models for the whole society to witness, and to emulate.

(For my conversation with Marcel, please view here:)