The Believer’s Exit: When Loyalty Meets Lockdown
History is a tragicomedy starring ordinary people who spend decades licking the boots of the state, only to act entirely shocked when the boot finally stomps on their own throats. Meet Bu Yang and his wife Cui Ying, veteran Party members in China with over thirty years of loyal service under their belts. To them, the authoritarian apparatus was never an oppressive monster to be fought; it was simply the weather—a set of inescapable laws to navigate, adapt to, and exploit. When their son Bu Qian was in high school, they badgered him to join the Party, treating ideological alignment like filling out a routine tax form. Bu Yang even helpfully suggested copying an online template, explaining that party membership was just a pragmatic cheat code for college credits and future job applications.
Bu Yang’s worldview was a masterpiece of compliant self-preservation. When asked about historical traumas like the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, he neatly compartmentalized reality: if he had been in Beijing, he might have marched, but since he wasn't, the event belonged to a distant, untouchable realm. "China will never have another event like that," he convinced himself, trading historical memory for daily stability. He constantly warned his son to keep his head down, avoid public commentary, and fear the omnipotent digital dragnet of big data. It was the ancestral survival manual of the Chinese subject handed down through generations: you cannot change the system, so never be the tall tree that catches the wind.
Yet, the ultimate punchline of this absolute loyalty was their supreme sacrifice: back in the day, Cui Ying dutifully aborted a second pregnancy to strictly comply with the state's One-Child Policy, wearing her obedience like a badge of collective honor. Having survived the terror of the Cultural Revolution and sacrificed their own flesh and blood for the machinery of the state, this couple should have been the system's most indestructible pillars. But then came the catastrophic Shanghai lockdown of 2022. Locked in their homes with dwindling food supplies, the gray theoretical reality of authoritarianism suddenly became a concrete wall crashing down on their skulls. Cui Ying finally understood a truth her son had told her years earlier: a speck of dust from the era's grand march is only a mountain when it crushes your own family. Her response to her son was a devastatingly brief six-character text: "Son, you were right." Today, these lifelong loyalists are busy applying for Thai retirement visas, planning their escape from the very empire they spent a lifetime worshipping.
Human nature is fiercely transactional until the illusion breaks. Our evolutionary wiring drives us to submit to dominant hierarchies, trading personal autonomy for the false promise of tribal protection. We tell ourselves that if we just play by the rules, the tigers won't eat us. But totalitarian systems do not care about your thirty years of loyal service; they only care about compliance. When the machinery breaks down, the faithful are ground up just as easily as the rebels. The great irony of the runren phenomenon is watching the ultimate believers pack their bags, realizing too late that the safest place in an absolute dictatorship is always a one-way ticket out.