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Opinion | Why 1 couple’s interrupted Chinese property dream hit a nation’s nerve
- Liangliang and Lijun’s Chinese dream fell apart when construction on their new home stopped, a pandemic pay cut made things harder and they had to leave the city
- Their videos resonated with many young Chinese who had seen the same dream end in disappointment, as the country entered an economic downturn
The first video that Liangliang and Lijun posted on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, was just eight seconds long. The couple in their 20s stood shyly with a line of property agents. As they counted down, the agents pulled on handheld poppers, raining confetti on the couple, and yelled: “Congratulations!”
The couple had become the 5,269th homebuyer at Sunac China Holdings in Zhengzhou, Henan province. That was November 2021, eight years after they met, two months from their wedding and 11 months from the birth of their daughter. But in May 2022, the developer would become indebted and halt construction.
Liangliang, or Zhang Yiliang, and his wife, Dong Lijun, had seemed no different from many of their peers. On their Douyin account, they completed viral dance challenges and recorded their daily lives – buying new glasses, going to the hospital, cooking a meal at home.
They started to build a large following in December 2021 after Dong posted a video, crying as she said her pay had been cut to just 2,000 yuan (US$280) a month. The couple had a combined income of about 9,000 a month, with most of it – 6,293 yuan – going to pay the mortgage.
In one video, she came home from work looking sad, saying she had wanted to buy meat for her husband’s dinner but switched to tofu because of her pay cut. It was the height of the Covid-19 epidemic. Many had suffered similar misfortunes – their companies had gone bankrupt, they were struggling to live in the big cities.
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