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Asia Times
4 days ago
- General
- Asia Times
A 16th-century Chinese writer's take on workplace burnout
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.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Yahoo
iPad submerged 5 years in London's River Thames helps unlock murder plot
(NEXSTAR) – The iPad was covered in dark mud after five years at the bottom of England's longest river, the Thames, but it was the chip inside that helped police crack a five-year-old murder plot. The case dates back to July 11, 2019 when six bullets slammed through back doors and windows of an upscale East London home, striking a 45-year-old man standing in the kitchen, nearly killing him. That man, identified by the BBC as a rival named Paul Allen, was left paralyzed after a bullet struck him in the spinal cord. 'It is only for the intervention of police first responder and medical professionals that the victim wasn't killed,' said Detective Superintendent Matt Webb, who led the investigation. 'This attack may look like the plot to a Hollywood blockbuster but the reality is something quite different. This was horrific criminality.' As a result of the investigation, on Monday, a jury found Daniel Kelly, 46, and brothers Stewart and Louis Ahearne, 46 and 36 years of age, respectively, guilty of shooting a man inside an East London home in 2019. London's Metropolitan Police say the trio surveilled Allen for weeks before Kelly and Louis Ahearne snuck into the garden of a home that overlooked Allen's rental, just before bullets rang out at 11:09 p.m. It would take detectives five years, however, to discover what the three men had used to track Allen. What started as an investigation into a would-be murder would grow to involve a museum heist, a robbery at a luxury apartment and international charges. In the weeks after the shooting, detectives made a number of breakthroughs that would allow them to charge Kelly and the Ahearnes. Lab tests confirmed that DNA found on a fence of the neighboring home, from where police believe the shots were fired, was a match for Kelly and Louis Ahearne. Bullets found inside the home, along with bullet casings in the garden, were consistent with a Glock SLP handgun. Police found the same type of gun, with an added laser sight, while searching Kelly's address weeks after the shooting. Where does your neighborhood rank among the 2025 'Best Places to Live'? Using license plate recognition technology and footage from CCTV cameras, detectives linked the rented car Stewart Ahearne allegedly drove to the East London home to a burglary at a home in Sevenoaks, an affluent town in Kent, the same evening as the shooting. A call to the car company eventually confirmed that Ahearne had rented it. As detectives continued to gather evidence, they also started working with law enforcement in Switzerland, where burglars had made off with historic artifacts from the Museum of Far Eastern Arts in Geneva a month before the shooting. The crooks had used a sledgehammer, angle grinders and crowbars to force their way into the museum, shattering glass casings and making off with several Ming Dynasty-era antiques valued at nearly 4 million dollars, according to the BBC. Authorities said were able to tie the men to the burglary after Stewart Ahearne cut his stomach on the jagged hole they left in the front door, leaving DNA at the scene. Louis Ahearne was also caught on camera taking videos of the interior and exterior of the museum the day before. The Ahearnes were extradited for trial in Switzerland and ultimately convicted in January, 2024, before they were sent back to stand trial for the Allen shooting. Shortly after they were returned to the United Kingdom but with months before the start of their trial, the BBC reports that Louis Ahearne included a noteworthy detail in his defense statement that likely sealed the guilty verdict. He recounted driving the hired car and said he hoped surveillance cameras showed him 'getting some air' while Kelly continued in the direction of the River Thames. 'Double sunrise' will be visible this weekend: How and where to see it Detectives initially theorized that the men were trying to dispose of a gun, Det. Supt. Webb said. What a search crew found instead was the iPad. Detectives found evidence that Kelly and the Ahearnes had been using the device to track a bug affixed to Allen's car. The sim card also linked Kelly to the Ahearnes, thanks to the call data, as well as Kelly's email account to purchases of multiple burner phones detectives said were used to discuss the plot. 'I can't repeat the words I used but my jaw dropped,' Webb told the BBC. 'What a beautiful piece of the puzzle to put together.' Sentencing in the case is set for Friday, April 25. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
