"This Is an Ordinary Day" | 2022 in Review

Curated by | Dark Tide Editorial

Here are our redefinitions of 36 words for this year:

War

In September, Shi Yuzhu, chairman of Giant Network who had stepped down as CEO years ago, suddenly posted on Weibo about his hands-on experience with the company's upcoming game in public beta. At the end of October, Tang Yan announced he would return as CEO of Momo. Almost simultaneously, numerous founders returned to the front lines of their companies.

Behind this lies the perilous challenges facing internet companies. The term "wartime CEO" began circulating. According to Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, for many years before the summer of 2021, Chinese internet companies of a certain scale had essentially lived in peacetime.

Rock 'n' Roll

In the depths of a Beijing winter, corners of shopping malls and building corridors became shelters for some. Among them was a delivery driver from Langfang. His joints aching, he had spent several nights trying every position but still couldn't fall asleep. His wife was locked down at a logistics company. Their older son, left at home, had burned spinach black. Their younger son was still in kindergarten.

Music was the source of strength in his ordinary life. "Don't judge me by how I look," he said. His idol was Cui Jian, and while delivering orders he loved listening to Rock 'n' Roll on the New Long March.

Memory

On the evening of June 15, Luo Min, founder of Qudian, launched his debut livestream on Douyin to promote his company's new project "Qudian Pre-made Meals," saying "like New Oriental's Teacher Yu, I'm making a business transformation." But netizens weren't buying it. The bullet comments went straight to Qudian's predecessor Qufenqi and its controversial "campus loan" business, accused of fueling excessive consumption, violent debt collection, and nude loan scams. "The internet has a memory."

The following month, Luo Min appeared in New Oriental's livestream room and sent consecutive gifts, only to be blocked by the East Buy livestream.

Dong Yuhui responded to this: "The director, having just graduated from university, sometimes has some personal grudges. He wanted to block him, and after hearing that, I thought it was quite reasonable."

Brief

In July, AMTD Digital became the "epic meme stock" of 2022's US-listed Chinese companies. In the 14 trading days after its IPO, it surged over 300 times at its peak, its market cap briefly surpassing Alibaba and Tencent. Yet AMTD Digital had only about 50 employees, with 2021 revenue of just HK$196 million.

This was an extremely brief, even bizarre spectacle. The company behind it became mired in controversy, its true situation murky and confusing.

2022's US-listed Chinese stocks were a record of mingled tragedy and comedy.

Speech

On November 5, a screenshot circulated online showing that six films had been released in theaters the previous day, among which Deep in the Forest, a Deer Appears had box office of ¥75 with 2 viewers. But Maoyan Professional Edition data showed the film's first-day box office was actually ¥56.

Five days later, the 35th Golden Rooster Awards opened. Du Jiang took the stage: "These ten years have been a good era for Chinese cinema." Zhou Dongyu followed: "In China, this is a blessed land for us filmmakers."

Exception

In 1921, Carl Jung proposed dividing personality into 16 types using four dimensions. Thereafter, a mother-daughter pair without formal psychology training built upon this to create the MBTI test that exploded in popularity in 2022. Some companies incorporated it into their hiring process — if your result was I (Introverted) rather than E (Extroverted), your interview might end right there.

Some used this to label various people: Jack Ma and Richard Liu as ENTJ, Pony Ma as INTJ, William Ding as ESTP, and so on.

Yet Jung himself had explained his theory: "Humanity can be divided into eight types, but every individual should be an exception."

Desire

In the first half of 2022, 80,000 milk tea shops closed, while Mixue Ice Cream & Tea opened 6,000 new stores. One secret to Mixue's rapid expansion was partnering with people in lower-tier markets who wanted to become bosses.

Apparently one simple criterion for identifying such "bosses" was: do they want to buy a Mercedes? Those who did could understand why Mixue's seventh-generation store model used red-bottom signage with American 3M spray-painted fabric just like banks — "It's like buying a Mercedes. How can you compare prices with a QQ?"

Return

Singapore and the Middle East became new bases for Chinese venture capitalists. In Singapore alone, there were at least six large conferences in September, with hotel prices soaring to over ¥10,000 per night. A fund partner based long-term in the Middle East told Waves that virtually every prestigious domestic VC had paid visits.

But to date, most Chinese venture capitalists who rushed to these two places returned disappointed.

One Day

On November 7, Dingxiang County in Shanxi issued an urgent notice seeking secondary close contacts. The primary contact was a delivery driver. The epidemiological report showed he left home at 6:20 AM and worked until 10:53 PM — 17 hours in a day, 65 orders delivered, one meal eaten, one COVID test taken.

When reporters found this delivery driver, his response was: This was a very ordinary day.

Grabbing Orders

On December 4, a delegation of business representatives from Zhejiang Provincial Department of Commerce and other provincial departments drove to the airport to begin a six-day trip to Europe. This was the first delegation led by Zhejiang's provincial commerce department to go overseas and grab orders.

Economist Zhang Weiying believes Zhejiang merchants are the kind who "create opportunities where none exist, and seize opportunities where they do." "While the Iraq War hadn't ended and everyone's attention was still focused on who would be the final victor, Zhejiang merchants were already lining up at Iraq's doorstep, eagerly awaiting the business opportunities of Iraq's reconstruction."

Entrepreneur

In June, propelled by the extraordinary eloquence of teachers like Dong Yuhui, "East Buy," which had been operating for over half a year, instantly shot to fame. New Oriental Online and New Oriental's stock prices rose accordingly.

In October, SKYPEOPLE, a down jacket brand under Yuanfudao, successively opened stores in Shanghai and Beijing. Following the "double reduction" policy of 2021, this online education company has been gradually launching smart hardware including error printers, math practice devices, and smart exercise books, while also entering the maternal and infant products and coffee industries.

Mask

On the evening of November 7, the hearing for the case of "Zhang Ting and Lin Ruiyang's company suspected of online pyramid selling" concluded, with 19 principal suspects potentially facing administrative penalties of ¥11.3 billion. The next day, Zhang Ting, who hadn't appeared publicly in nearly a year, posted on her personal account: "I'm waiting for a fair ruling. I believe in my country."

Just days after being embroiled in the pyramid scheme controversy early in the year, Lin Ruiyang — with white hair, a kindly face, wearing a rose-red shirt — appeared on camera again selling anti-aging products, smearing them on his face and applying lipstick.

This year's hit film Home Coming had a classic line: "Wear a mask long enough, it becomes your real face."

Bill

On November 21, Barbie Hsu filed a lawsuit, suing Wang Xiaofei for ceasing to pay living expenses and requesting the seizure of his assets in Taipei, shredding years of "decency" to pieces.

One stone stirred a thousand waves. Wang Xiaofei posted over twenty Weibo messages in succession, claiming he had already "done his utmost," "doesn't want to pay electricity bills for this family anymore," "can't you change the mattress when you remarry?" and shared his sky-high bills.

Twenty years ago, Barbie Hsu had written in a song for Koo Jun-yup: "I can give you my favorite cake, I can give you all my savings... Our love will gnaw away at each other's evil hearts, until only pure love remains."

Shenzhen Bay One

It had been one year and eight months since Amazon's most aggressive "account suspension" campaign in history. This sweeping "great purge" of cross-border e-commerce affected tens of thousands of Chinese sellers. A joke circulating in Shenzhen's cross-border circle went:

Before, the ¥200,000+ per square meter apartments at Shenzhen Bay One were all bought by Amazon sellers!

This year, the plastic bottles at Shenzhen Bay One are all being collected by Amazon sellers!

Surviving

Early this year, a 28-year-old ByteDance engineer and a Bilibili content moderator died successively from overwork. A Tencent fresh graduate's rant "blasting leadership over extreme overtime" went viral. Meanwhile, accompanied by "anti-monopoly" measures, internet companies canceled the "big and small week" schedule, with some big tech employees even "going for group walks at 2 PM."

"You can't even survive, and you're still leisurely playing ball on weekends" — but by December 15, Pony Ma stated at Tencent's internal "cost reduction and efficiency improvement" employee meeting that if they couldn't float to the surface on their own (become self-sustaining), they could cut all of Tencent News.

Nearby

Twenty years of internet-enabled information speed have turned people into "intimate strangers." But the pandemic pulled humanity back to earlier times: bartering during special periods, organizing neighborhood group purchases of daily necessities, caring for and protecting the vulnerable around us. Geographic proximity became the first, or even only, step for many in forming social relationships.

Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: "Successful blocks are not collections of unrelated individuals. They are concrete, social and economic continuities."

Medicine

Baidu Index data shows that since March this year, searches for "psychological counseling" by Shanghai residents surged; from November to December, "psychological counseling" heat rose approximately 250% year-over-year.

In July, the video Three Days Back in My Village, My Uncle Healed My Spiritual Internal Friction by Bilibili creator Yige Caixiang received 46.63 million views.

Charles Zhang recently discussed anxiety: My anxiety generally doesn't last more than three days. So-called spiritual internal friction is falling into a certain anxiety. If you understand behavioral psychology, absolutely don't take medicine — taking medicine for a little anxiety will mess up your body.

Small

At the end of December, Xiaohongshu released its 2023 Top Ten Lifestyle Trends, with keywords including: "Warming Up with Neighbors," "Eating Authentic Local Flavors," "Taking a Trip Far Away," "Light Decompression," "Simplified Living," "Study Room Four Trends," "Wild Right at Your Doorstep," "Home as Peach Blossom Spring," "Idle Circulation," and "Going for Tea."

No matter how turbulent the grand era, Xiaohongshu is always Xiaohongshu.

Emotion

With its passionate lyrics and catchy phrasing, Lonely Warrior became this year's most popular children's song.

Even the Sisters Who Make Waves 3 production team hadn't anticipated: an 18-year-old song, Love You, would penetrate the soft hearts of countless middle-aged men across Chinese entertainment, and propel "Sweetheart Leader" Cyndi Wang to that season's championship.

The "very simple moves" of the shuttlecock exercise, paired with the hip-hop vitality of Compendium of Materia Medica, made Liu Genghong's livestream an instant hit when it first appeared, gaining tens of millions of followers in 30 days.

Investment

At the Beijing Winter Olympics, 19-year-old Eileen Gu, competing as a Chinese women's freestyle skier, won two golds and one silver, instantly becoming a phenomenon-level idol.

While people marveled at her nearly perfect life, they also congratulated her mother Gu Yan, an investor said to have introduced venture capital to China very early. A widely circulated claim was that although Gu Yan hadn't participated in the rise of any star company over the past 20 years, she had raised Eileen Gu — this was the most successful investment of all.

Back to School

As investment themes pushed into harder-core domains, investors had to reconstruct their knowledge structures. "Recently rereading the high school periodic table," a humanities-educated consumer investor told Waves.

1

Zero2IPO research found that among 400+ institutions and 1,500 funds established since 2011, only 2011 and 2012 vintage funds had DPI above 1. Most funds established from 2013 onward had DPI below 1.

In 2022, DPI (distribution to paid-in capital) thoroughly replaced IRR (internal rate of return) as the sole metric LPs cared about. A fund's fundraising head joked: "LPs who ask about DPI right off the bat are like going on a blind date and immediately asking how much you earn per month."

Investors interviewed by Waves generally agreed that domestic RMB LPs' expectations for DPI will only grow higher.

Quiet

On May 5, an investor living in a high-rise apartment near Guomao took a photo of Jintong East Road at dusk. At this hour, it would normally be packed with traffic, but now only scattered delivery riders passed through.

This was the third year of humanity living with the pandemic. Localized lockdowns barely stirred any waves anymore — many were exhausted or even accustomed to it. But the Guomao lockdown still carried special significance. As a city's financial hub, Guomao to Beijing was like Central to Hong Kong, or Lujiazui to Shanghai.

Zero2IPO data shows that in the first three quarters of 2022, investment market pace slowed, with 8,631 deals and ¥725.694 billion in value, down 9.4% and 33.9% year-over-year.

Fork in the Road

On September 21, China's investment world experienced a subtle temporal coincidence: as a group of Chinese USD fund investors participated in the Super Return Asia conference at Singapore's Marina Bay Sands, a group of RMB fund investors were participating in 36Kr's China Fund Partners Summit by the Qiantang River.

This year, people began to confirm that USD and RMB funds had completely diverged, with the globalization and localization narratives of China's investment industry fully stepping into different rivers.

Ending

On June 14, Jumbo Kingdom, affected by the pandemic and closed for two years, departed from Sham Wan Pier. This vessel was a filming location for The God of Cookery and part of Stanley Ho's family business empire.

Five days later, as the ship reached deep waters in the South China Sea, it suddenly encountered rough waves and ultimately sank. With water depths exceeding 1,000 meters at the site, it could not be salvaged.

Fang Zhigang, former academic director of the Royal Hong Kong Observatory, stated in an interview: At the time, maximum wind speeds in the South China Sea were 35 km/h. Taking the ship out to open sea under these conditions, "there was really only one possible ending."

Shareholder

"Earth is now our only shareholder." On September 15, the founder family of American outdoor brand Patagonia made a decision: going forward, all profits from this 49-year-old company, beyond what was needed to maintain operations, would go entirely to protecting the planet.

Eight years earlier, "Starbucks father" Howard Schultz had posed the same question: What is a company's mission and responsibility? How to achieve a fragile balance between business profit and social responsibility? Schultz firmly believed that no matter how vast the business empire, it could never defeat love and mercy.

Leveling Up

In 2022, "bailan" (letting things rot) surpassed last year's "tangping" (lying flat) in usage frequency on the Chinese internet, becoming the buzzword of the year.

"Bailan" actually originates from the NBA, where the English is "tanking" — some teams deliberately lose to rank as low as possible, in order to get better draft picks the following year. The original English meaning involves strategically losing, similar to the "Tian Ji races his horses" strategy.

Alarm Clock

"What is the goal of human struggle?"

"It's to live a life not woken by alarm clocks. All people, the goal of life's struggle is to hope there's no alarm clock in life."

In April, writer Yu Hua became a rising star on Bilibili and in the stand-up comedy world. His masterful quips were edited into Nightmare of the Literary World, topping the鬼畜 (Kichiku/meme) charts. Yu Hua's formula for traffic was easily cracked: his remarks happened to resonate with this generation of anti-hustle, anti-chicken-soup, anti-affectation burnout youth. The last literati to have such heat was considered to be Lu Xun.

Establishment

On July 6, Jackson Yee and other celebrities were publicly admitted to the National Theatre of China, and it was immediately revealed that the theatre had canceled written exams this year, with suspicions that these establishment positions were "carrot pits" reserved for celebrities. Discussions and doubts about "unfair establishment recruitment" boiled over. Ten days later, Jackson Yee announced he would give up the position.

On November 3, registration for the 2023 national civil service exam closed. Total applicants increased by 500,000 from last year, exceeding 2.5 million — the highest in a decade.

Bubble

On-chain data shows that on April 29, 2022, Bored Ape BAYC #9279 was purchased by Allen Zhu, managing partner of GSR Ventures, for 170 ETH, then approximately $479,000. Zhu then set it as his WeChat profile picture and posted on Moments: "All consumer companies invested by GSR can get free authorization for Bored Ape 9279."

Thereafter, the Web3 industry experienced successive collapses of star projects including Luna, StepN, and FTX, with the crypto market falling into a prolonged winter. At press time, calculated at BAYC floor price of 73.9 ETH, Allen Zhu's purchased BAYC #9279 is worth approximately $90,000, an unrealized loss of over 80%.

Low Profile

Had it not been for abnormal nucleic acid result entries, perhaps no one would have paid attention to an obscure laboratory: this COVID testing company called "Hezi Huaxi" had already blossomed across cities nationwide, established over 30 branch companies, and even initiated IPO preparations. Recently, this company was successively reported for forging medical certificates and incorrectly entering positive cases as negative in the system.

"We've always been very low profile," the founder Zhang Hezi's brother once said.

In the Name of Love

At the end of October, Liu Hanbo, a female teacher at Xinzheng No. 3 Middle School in Henan, died suddenly from a heart attack while teaching an online class from home. Her daughter believed the direct cause of her mother's death was being attacked three consecutive times by "online class bombers." The work of online class bombers involves breaking into designated online classes, flooding screens with profanity, insulting teachers, playing pornographic videos, and so on — typically charging about ¥10 per job.

The music that must play when bombers appear is also called the "execution song" or "battle song." This is an Italian electronic dance track whose first lyric is "amore" — meaning "love."

Source

In an interview this year, an RMB fund investor told Waves that 75% to 80% of funds in the RMB market came from government or state-owned capital, currently the primary source of capital in China's primary market.

Statistics released by the Ministry of Finance in late November showed: from January to October 2022, national issuance of new local government bonds was ¥4.6977 trillion, up 28.27% year-over-year; as of the end of October, national local government debt balance exceeded ¥35 trillion, reaching 93.42% of the annual debt limit.

Crazy Thursday

February 24 was a Thursday. Russia launched its special military operation against Ukraine, and the two sides officially went to war. Prior to this, mainstream opinion generally held that a Russia-Ukraine hot war might not break out.

September 8 was a Thursday. Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom passed away at 96. Before her death, she had appointed new Prime Minister Liz Truss.

October 20 was a Thursday. Just 45 days after the Queen's death, Truss announced her resignation, becoming the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history.

KFC launched a promotion called "Crazy Thursday" in 2018, which also unexpectedly went viral this year and became an internet meme phenomenon.

Sweet

In the second week of December, Taobao searches for "canned yellow peaches" rose 3,764% week-over-week, with sales up 1,300%. For Northeasterners, this was also a childhood memory: whenever they had a cold or cough, they had to eat it.

In the 2022 Qatar World Cup final, Argentina defeated France to win the championship. After 36 years, Argentina lifted the World Cup trophy for the third time, and 35-year-old Lionel Messi, as everyone had hoped, finally ascended to the throne of football's greatest.

Renamed

On December 26, 2022, the National Health Commission announced that "novel coronavirus pneumonia" would be renamed "novel coronavirus infection," and the "Category B managed as Category A" approach for COVID-19 would be adjusted to "Category B managed as Category B."

Text | Yu Lili, Xu Muxin, Guo Yunxiao, Ren Qian, Huang Zhuxi, He Lixin, Zhang Yi, Tian Yu

Editor | Jing Liu

References:

"The Lonely Cheng Yikuai, 'Wartime' CEO," LatePost

"Becoming China's Largest Chain: The Mixue Ice Cream & Tea Growth Story," LatePost

"In the Cold Night of the Pandemic, Delivery Riders Search for Sleep," Story Hardcore

"I Smell the Scent of a Typical Entrepreneur," Qianjiang Evening News

"Before Dong Yuhui's Explosive Fame, East Buy Only Had ¥24.6 Million Revenue in Six Months, Less Than One Livestream's Sales Now," Times Finance

"Positioning High-End Down Jacket Newcomer SKYPEOPLE Sky People, Can It Seize a Place in the Hundred-Billion Market," TMTPost

"Pony Ma's Internal Speech: Don't Talk to Me About Buying Traffic Anymore," Jiemian

"Charles Zhang Dialogues with Peng Kaiping: People Must Make Trouble to Live," China Entrepreneur

"From Wall Street to China — Gu Yan and Her Venture Capital," China Science and Technology Information

"Zero2IPO Ni Zhengdong: Current Status and Thinking on China's VC/PE Market," ChinaVenture

"Local Government Bond Issuance and Debt Balance Situation in October 2022," Budget Department, Ministry of Finance of the People's Republic of China

Image Sources | Visual China, Deep in the Forest, a Deer Appears, China Science and Technology Information, Opensea, Pinterest

Layout | Guo Yunxiao