A 16th-century Chinese writer's take on workplace burnout

AllAfrica

29-05-2025

We are in the middle of a global workplace burnout epidemic. Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has aptly coined the term 'burnout society.'
Four centuries ago, late-Ming Dynasty scholar-official Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610) shifted from state administrative work to xiaopin — brief, personal essays celebrating everyday pleasures like gardening, leisurely excursions and long vigils beside a rare blossom.
Today, his Ming Dynasty-era practice resonates with uncanny urgency within our burnout epidemic. The cover of The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (Stanford University Press).
Amid the Wanli Emperor's neglect and escalating bureaucratic infighting in Beijing, Yuan turned away from what today we call a 'toxic workplace.'
Instead, he found refuge in Jiangnan's landscapes and literary circles.
There he exchanged hierarchical pressures, administrative tedium and cut-throat careerism for moments of unhurried attention.
Yuan's xiaopin , alongside those of his contemporaries, transformed fleeting sensory moments into radical acts of resilience, suggesting that beauty, not institutions, could outlast empires.
The late Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) was an era of contradictions.
While Europe hurtled toward colonialism and scientific rationalism, China's Jiangnan region — the fertile Yangtze Delta in today's Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces — flourished via merchant wealth, global silver trade and a thriving print culture.
Bookshops lined city streets like modern cafés. They peddled plays, poetry and xiaopin volumes like Meiyou Pavilion of Arts and Leisure (1630) and Sixteen Xiaopin Masters of the Imperial Ming (1633).
The imperial examination system, a civil service written exam — once a path to prestige — had become a bottleneck. Thousands of scholars languished in bureaucratic limbo, channelling their frustrations and exhaustion into xiaopin 's intimate vignettes. Chinese imperial examination candidates gathering around a wall where the results are posted (painting by Qiu Ying, c. 1540). Photo: .National Palace Museum)
In his preface to Meiyou Pavilion , editor Zheng Yuanxun (1603–1644) praised the genre's 'flavor beyond flavor, rhythm beyond rhythm' — a poetic nod to its rich sensory detail and subtle musicality — rejecting moralizing orthodox prose by embracing immersive aesthetics.
Against neo-Confucianism's rigid hierarchies, xiaopin elevated the private, the ephemeral and the esthetically oblique: a well-brewed pot of tea, the texture of moss on a garden rock and incense wafting through a study.
Wei Shang, professor of Chinese culture at Columbia University, has noted that such playful texts flourished among late-Ming literati disillusioned with the era's constraints. The texts reframed idleness and sensory pleasure as subtle dissent within a status-obsessed society.
Long before French poet Charles Baudelaire's flâneur used dandyism and idle promenades to resist the alienating pace of western modernity, Ming literati such as Chen Jiru (1558–1639) and Gao Lian (1573–1620) framed idleness as defiance.
Drawing on Daoist wu wei (non-action), Gao praised the 'crystal clear retreat' that scrubbed the heart of 'worldly grime' and cultivated 'a tranquil heart and joyful spirit.' For him, human worth lay not in bureaucratic promotions but in savoring tea, listening to crickets or resting against a well-fluffed pillow. A hanging scroll, ink on paper of a plum blossom branch by Chen Jiu (1558–1639). Photo: Yale University Art Gallery/S. Sidney Kahn, 1959 / Christie's, lot 677, 1983 / Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice, 1985), CC BY
Hung-tai Wang, a cultural historian at Academia Sinica in Taipei, identifies xiaopin as a 'leisurely and elegant' esthetic rooted in nature's rhythms.
Chen Jiru, a Ming Dynasty-era painter and essayist, embodied this framework by disallowing transactional logic. In one essay, Chen lauds those who possess 'poetry without words, serenity without sutras, joy without wine.' In other words, he admired those whose lives resonated through prioritizing lived gestures over abstract ideals.
In the late Ming's burgeoning urban and commercial milieu, xiaopin turned everyday objects into remedies for social isolation.
In the Jiangnan gardens, late Ming essayists saw landscapes infused with emotion. At the time, essayist Wu Congxian called it 'lodging meaning among mountains and rivers:' moonlight turned into icy jade, oar splashes into cosmic echoes.
Chen Jiru had study rituals — fingering a bronze cauldron, tapping an inkstone — and curated what he termed 'incense for solitude, tea for clarity, stone for refinement.'
This cultivation of object-as-presence anticipates American literary scholar Bill Brown's 'thing theory,' in which everyday items invite embodied contemplation and challenge the subject-object binary that enables commodification.
The Ming Dynasty-era scholar-connoisseur Wen Zhenheng (1585–1645) turned domestic minutiae into philosophical resistance.
His xiaopin framed everyday choices — snowmelt for tea, rooms facing narrow water, a skiff 'like a study adrift' — as rejections of abstraction. Through details like cherries on porcelain or tangerines pickled before ripening, he asserted that value lies in presence, not utility.
Wen suggests that exhaustion stems not from labour but from disconnection. The Garden of the Inept Administrator (Zhuozheng Yuan) by Wen Zhengming, 1551. Wen painted 31 views of the site, each accompanied by a poem and a descriptive note. (Gift of Douglas Dillon, 1979/MET open source collection), CC BY
Just as xiaopin turned domestic rituals into resistance, today's movements recast the mundane as a mode of defiance.
In April 2021, China's tang ping ('lying flat') movement surfaced with a post by former factory worker Luo Huazhong: 'Lying flat is justice.' The message was simple and subversive: work had become intolerable, and opting out was not laziness but resistance.
In a backlash against China's '996' work model extolled by tech moguls like Jack Ma, tang ping rejects the sacrifice of dignity and mental health for productivity and casts idleness as a quiet revolt against exploitative norms.
In the West, the Covid-19 pandemic sparked similar reckonings. The 'Great Resignation' saw millions leave unfulfilling jobs. And 'quiet quitting' rejected unpaid overtime and emotional labor. These movements emerged as a soft refusal of hustle culture.
As anthropologist David Graeber argues in Bullshit Jobs (2018), the 'moral and spiritual damage' inflicted by meaningless work reflects a profound political failure.
Just like the late-Ming literati who poured their lives into a state that repaid them with hollow titles and bureaucratic decay, today's workers withdraw from institutions that exploit their labor yet treat them as disposable.
Unlike French philosopher Michel de Montaigne's introspective self-examination in his Renaissance-era Essays , xiaopin refuses utility. In doing so, it inverts the contemporary self-help trend critiqued by Byung-Chul Han, which co-opts personal 'healing' as a form of productivity through neoliberal logic.
Xiaopin proposes resistance as an existential shift beyond (self-)optimization. Its most radical gesture is not to demand change but to live as if the system's demands are irrelevant.
Xiaopin asks: What is progress without presence? Its fragments — on lotus ponds, summer naps, a cat's shadow — prove that resistance need not be loud.
Like Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's vision of contemporary literature as 'space of individual recovery,' the genre shelters us from 'hierarchy and efficiency.'
Here, time is not spent but reclaimed.
To pause in an age of weaponized ambition is in fact revolt. Tracing a petal's vein, sipping tea until bitterness fades, lying flat as the machinery of productivity grinds on — these are not acts of shirking reality but defiant gestures against the systems that feed on our exhaustion. They are affirmations of agency: microcosms where we rehearse what it means to belong to ourselves, and thus, to the world.
Xiaopin 's revolution awakens in a flicker of attention: a reminder that presence, too, is a language — one that hums beneath the buzz of progress, waiting to be heard.
Jason Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Center, Toronto Metropolitan University, and Xiao He is a master's student in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.