Judgment
Everything I knew about the nineties began with a cardboard box full of clutter in the corner of my father’s study.
It was like a forgotten tomb, smelling of old paper and faintly oxidized plastic.
One weekend afternoon, Ame was bored, so she began an archaeological excavation.
My first discovery was a stack of 3.5-inch floppy disks held together by a rubber band.
Their plastic cases came in different colors: classic cream, solemn black, and a few blue ones. I picked one up and pushed its little metal shutter aside, exposing the dark brown magnetic disc beneath. My father said his most important documents, the first few files he ever wrote, had been stored on these fragile pieces of plastic with a capacity of just 1.44 MB.
Deeper in the box, I found copies of Computer Enthusiast and Computer News, their covers curling at the edges.
The pages had yellowed. The glossy color advertisements now carried an outdated, sincere enthusiasm. I wasn’t interested in the complicated articles about overclocking and building PCs, but a tutorial on manually finding and removing the CIH virus in DOS fascinated me. FDISK, FORMAT, KV300…
Beside the excavation lay a few volumes of my grandfather’s memoirs. In the plainest printed type, they recounted his life, from war to reconstruction. I read them, but remembered little. Perhaps this is how a person’s life is forgotten.
My mother joined our little family remembrance.
She recalled taking computer classes at work. The very first thing was memorizing MS-DOS commands, CD and the like.
Later, I touched—or, more precisely, dug out with Dad—the family’s first computer, sealed away in the storeroom.
A Pentium III.
Its case was heavy cream-colored plastic, already slightly yellow. The monitor was enormous and cumbersome. I pressed the solid power button with its distinct click. The screen took a long time to warm up before finally glowing, accompanied by the roar of a fan.
At that moment, for reasons I couldn’t explain, the Windows 98 icon labeled “Connect to the Internet” suddenly made me sad.
In a children’s magazine from 1999, I read a phrase: “the new-new generation.”
In a tone almost like spreading the gospel, the article painted a glittering picture for children about to enter a new century.
The “new-new generation” were young people at the cutting edge of technology! They chatted on OICQ and posted their opinions on BBS forums. Their lives were inseparable from the internet, and the entire world would open before them as a borderless “global village”!
The phrase struck my childhood self like a bullet.
I imagined growing up to become one of them, wearing stylish clothes, using the newest computer, saying “Hi” to the whole world.
I quietly did the math. The young “new-new generation” of the nineties must have been born in the seventies.
Involuntarily, I looked toward my father in the kitchen, struggling with some leaking water pipe. He wore a T-shirt bought ten years ago. Fine beads of sweat covered his forehead; his lips were pressed together.
This… was the “new-new generation”?
Chapter One: The End of History
An era began with a flag coming down.
It was the Soviet red flag, quietly descending over the Kremlin, like an exhausted actor finally removing a heavy costume after the last performance.
A vast empire ended not in a nuclear mushroom cloud, but on a cold winter day, dying of its own blood loss and rigidity.
History was slammed shut with a bang.
This was the epitaph the victors wrote for us.
They said that from now on, there would be no more competing paths, no more debates over ideology.
All human wisdom had converged on a single final answer: free markets, global trade, and the utterly unhindered movement of capital.
They promised us the end of history.
What they did not tell us was that this was actually the beginning of the reckoning.
A grand, dazzling judgment for which all of us would eventually pay dearly, each in our own way.
Chapter Two: The Hallucinogen
The future dropped into our lives in a form we could consume.
It was called the internet.
It connected places around the world, but soon caught the attention of commercial companies.
Here was magic that needed no profit, no logic, only “eyeballs” and “click-through rates” to expand without limit.
Add “**.com**” to a company’s name and you held the key to the temple of wealth.
A company called Pets.com, with a sock-puppet mascot, spent millions advertising during the Super Bowl before it had sold many bags of dog food, then successfully went public.
Another, Webvan, announced that it would sell groceries over the internet. Before working out its logistics costs, it spent a billion dollars building mythical automated warehouses. Its market value once exceeded that of all physical supermarket chains combined.
The Federal Reserve chairman of that era was Alan Greenspan.
Like an experienced bartender, he kept lowering interest rates, supplying the carnival with an endless stream of cheap liquor.
He told everyone not to worry. This time was different.
Technology had ironed out the business cycle.
Prosperity would never end.
Yet every bubble contains a poisonous core.
To make the capital game even more enjoyable, the Clinton administration formally repealed the Depression-era Glass–Steagall Act in 1999.
The firewall separating deposit-taking banks from investment banks was demolished.
Ordinary people’s savings could now legally become chips on a gaming table, wagered in the riskiest financial gambles.
Every floodgate had been opened in advance of a greater storm, one capable of swallowing everything.
And while Wall Street and Silicon Valley celebrated the victory of “the end of history,” history itself was reminding people of its existence on American streets, in the most primal ways.
- Los Angeles.
After four white police officers who had beaten a Black man, Rodney King, were acquitted, flames of anger engulfed the city.
Six days of unrest left more than sixty dead, thousands injured, and over ten thousand businesses burned or looted.
National Guard armored vehicles rolled through smoking neighborhoods. The scene was indistinguishable from Yugoslavia.
This was no longer the “American dream” promised to everyone. It was a civil war between two Americas, divided by class and race, unable to understand each other.
- Oklahoma City.
A homemade bomb hidden in a truck tore a vast, terrifying opening through the north face of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
168 lives vanished in an instant, including those of nineteen children.
The killer was not an enemy from outside, but someone from within: a military veteran consumed by resentment toward the federal government.
A muffled explosion from the heart of the empire.
It announced that absolute trust in the state and its order had disappeared.
The fires of Los Angeles. The explosion in Oklahoma.
They were not isolated events.
They were different symptoms of the same illness.
That illness was this: in a system that pushes individualism to its limit and treats social Darwinism as sacred, the bonds between people are severed.
Communities disintegrate. Trust disappears.
Only atomized individuals remain, each facing the indifference of the whole world alone beneath immense, invisible pressure.
The bursting of the dot-com bubble, followed by the far deadlier financial tsunami of 2008, created by Wall Street’s greed, was merely this illness reaching its inevitable economic eruption.
Chapter Three: Numbness
Before the nineties, Japan was synonymous with “capitalism’s model student.”
Its workers’ blood and sweat created the postwar economic miracle.
But when the Plaza Accord compelled the yen to rise and Wall Street’s hot money flooded the islands, the model student went mad too.
Land became a new religion.
Late at night in Tokyo’s Ginza, you had to wave stacks of ten-thousand-yen notes just to make a taxi stop.
Mitsubishi Estate bought New York’s Rockefeller Center, a symbol of American glory.
Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance acquired Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at a price unimaginable at the time.
People believed the land in Tokyo’s twenty-three wards could buy the entire United States.
Yet the myth shattered overnight.
When the Bank of Japan slammed on the brakes, the bubble, inflated to its limit, burst.
From a peak near forty thousand points, the Nikkei began a fall that would last decades.
Overnight, assets became liabilities.
Countless ordinary families who had borrowed to buy homes at the peak became slaves to “negative equity,” spending their lives repaying houses whose value had halved.
The myth of “lifetime employment” collapsed. “Karōshi”—death from overwork, a term steeped in black humor—became a distinctively Japanese social phenomenon.
Young people stopped believing in striving. They chose to become “freeters,” surviving at the bare minimum through temporary jobs and refusing to become screws in the machine.
A deeper collapse came from within society itself.
In 1995 came the Great Hanshin Earthquake. A modern city thought impregnable proved helpless before a natural disaster.
Then came the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway.
A doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo released a lethal nerve agent on rush-hour trains.
Rescuers in gas masks and office workers collapsing in agony on platforms: this surreal image shattered the last defense of the Japanese belief that “our country is absolutely safe.”
When a society built on collectivism and absolute order loses its economic engine and sees its spiritual pillars collapse, what remains is the “lost twenty years,” the “lost thirty years”: numbness and stagnation with no end in sight.
Japan’s tragedy was to rehearse, in the most devastating way, what awaits a country that mortgages all its dignity, dreams, and future to a global system dominated by speculative capital.
Chapter Four: Fading
In China, the story of the nineties began with another, deeper bargain.
After the silence at the turn of spring and summer that year, an unspoken contract was placed before everyone:
“**Abandon your fantasies. Forget the slogans. Accept reality!**”
And so the whole country plunged headlong into the surging torrent of the market economy.
The first to pay, however, were those the era discarded.
Across the heavy-industrial northeast, vast state-owned factories once hailed as “the republic’s eldest sons” acquired cold iron padlocks overnight.
“Laid off”: a phrase so gentle it was almost cruel. It meant tens of millions of workers, together with their families, being torn out of the national machine like worn-out parts.
A middle-aged man who had given his entire life to a steel furnace had all his pride and skills bound to a factory that had gone cold.
When the factory disappeared, he disappeared with it.
His life, and everything he believed in, had been declared negative equity.
Enormous social change brought a loss of order.
Behind the Strike Hard campaigns stood a staggeringly high crime rate.
On slow, crowded green-painted trains full of mingled smells, you had to sew your fare home into the pocket of your underwear.
You could not know whether the silent man beside you would slit your luggage with a razor blade while you slept.
Bai Baoshan. Zhang Jun. Names of serial killers circulated like urban legends in the dark.
With extreme violence, they retaliated against a society they believed owed them something.
They were the most brutal monsters born of that upheaval.
The other face of the coin was power’s carnival.
Exploiting loopholes in the dual-track pricing system, they could effortlessly turn an official approval into a railway car of steel, then into stacks of brand-new renminbi.
This was the most savage, shameless plunder.
It demonstrated beyond dispute that in this new game, the rules would always be tailored for those with the power to make them.
We had thought we were trading sweat and sacrifice for a better future.
But the Chinese story of the nineties told us, with cruel logic, that this was more like an enormous mortgage.
We mortgaged fairness, security, and the collectivist ideals we had once believed beyond doubt.
What we received was a rapidly advancing economic miracle, and a society torn into countless pieces that could never be put back together.
Chapter Five: Echoes
History never truly passes.
It merely gathers strength, waiting for its next echo.
The American-led global system of the nineties, with consumerism as its hallucinogen and neoliberalism as its painkiller, did not die in the dot-com crash or the subprime crisis.
It simply evolved.
It became stronger, less visible, and colder.
Today, in China, we are experiencing its latest version firsthand.
When three years of lockdown ended, we thought life would return to normal.
Instead, we saw something else: an unending succession of vehicle-ramming attacks.
The revenge was aimed at no particular person, but at society itself, at the suffocating calm in which “everything carries on as usual.”
We saw a swelling tide of unemployment.
Well-dressed young people who had worked in office towers for ten years discovered they were merely “thirty-five-year-olds” to be optimized away at any moment.
They flooded into food delivery and ride-hailing, entering a zero-sum game more fiercely competitive and more hopeless than before.
Was this not version 2.0 of the nineties’ “mass layoffs”?
This time, the iron rice bowl had simply been exchanged for the employee badges of multinational offices and internet giants.
What remained unchanged was the same helplessness and bewilderment of being abandoned by one’s era.
Most people chose to carry on living.
To keep sharing elegant afternoon teas and weekend camping photos on social media.
To keep enthusiastically placing orders in livestreams for things they could never use up.
We are like passengers in a leaking boat. So long as our own seats are dry, we pretend all is well. We even have the leisure to mock those already overboard for the inelegance of their swimming.
This is the enormous shadow the ghost of the nineties casts upon today.
It has persuaded us that every problem is an individual problem.
You are poor because you did not work hard enough.
You failed because you did not keep up with the times.
It has severed every possibility of connecting with one another, turning us into isolated islands that spend all their energy destroying each other.
Chapter Six: I Saw a White Horse
And so I often feel a fear that reaches into my bones.
A fear that “something big is coming.”
Because I know this system has accumulated too many contradictions and resentments.
I know the magnificent bridge to the future we once took such pride in, built from reinforced concrete and flesh and blood, has foundations riddled with corrosion.
Its piers are making cracking sounds we pretend not to hear.
After all, this is a grand, dazzling judgment for which all of us will eventually pay dearly, each in our own way.
London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down.
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.