The Partying Gap

Beijing's campaign to foment loneliness abroad and good vibes at home

Derek Thompson recently declared the death of partying, finding that Americans spend significantly less time attending social events than they did twenty years ago. The largest decline — by almost 70% — occurred among people aged 15-24. Thompson offers a sophisticated analysis based on post-1970s individualism, gendered labor economics, and smartphones.

But he was far too nuanced. The single threat decaying Americans’ social lives is the Chinese Communist Party.

Last week, the Chinese Ministry of State Security published a bombshell report on its official WeChat account: the United States government secretly funds think tanks to push “lying flat” (躺平) upon Chinese youth, brainwashing them into believing that “working hard is for losers.”

But while Brookings was busy influencing Chinese twenty-somethings, China’s government was not sitting idle. An exclusive ChinaTalk investigation has uncovered Beijing’s quiet counter-offensive: a two-front campaign to foment loneliness abroad and good vibes at home.

Sabotage Stateside

Suppressing American partying required a surgical institutional intervention executed at scale: the resident advisor. By penetrating higher education institutions, Ministry of State Security (MSS) agents have introduced the concept of RAs or fudaoyuan. These agents of the administration are tasked with patrolling dormitories to remove all items potentially conducive to vibrant social lives. They drew from America’s proud history of Prohibition, adapting adapted the new RA system to exclusively focus on confiscating alcohol. The RAs, Dan Wang has confirmed, are the perfect adversary for a lawyerly society. Every instinct to host, mingle, or even leave the apartment now generates potential liability.

The campaign extends beyond the dorm. Cigarettes once forced strangers into proximity. The MSS’s masterstroke was the introduction of vaping: a Shenzhen-engineered substitute that delivers nicotine without forcing the user into social contact for a light or loosie. While exporting vapes abroad, the MSS has limited their ability to gain traction at home. Domestic Chinese smoking, largely conducted via traditional cigarette and therefore still social, remains among the world’s highest.

Recent American college grads, socially debilitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, vapes, and the pernicious RA system, have now entered the adult world. Instead of making friends, they’ve turned to obsessively polishing their appearances, all at the cost of American national security. “Mogging” could plausibly even be a Chinese loan word: mo jing means “to grind down the neck” in Mandarin, precisely the beauty practice preferred by certain Gen-Z leaders.

Catch Up and Surpass America’s Parties

China appears to be a relative latecomer to the global party scene, as decades of poverty and Maoist conservatism don’t form fertile ground for letting loose. But the Chinese archaeological record speaks to the civilization’s latent party power: every courtyard in the Forbidden City is outfitted with a giant bronze vat, expressly, scholars now believe, for punch-mixing.

The vibes in Dunhuang were immaculate

The CCP understands that an ample domestic party supply not only strengthens regime security but also augments the future of China’s development. As Xi declared at the 20th Party Congress: “without the Party, there can be no party” (没有党就没有派对). Beijing understands that partying power is zero-sum. In Xi’s New Era, there can only be one fun hegemon.

The intellectual architect of this campaign, ChinaTalk has learned, is Wang Huning. His foundational 1991 text America Against America identified American sociability as the central pillar of US hegemony. A draft sequel circulating among Standing Committee members, Vaping Alone, reportedly argues that an atomized America cannot project soft power and may very well suffer social collapse. This thesis has shaped both the domestic Common Partying initiative and a parallel covert program targeting American campuses.

The campaign reflects Beijing’s mastery of asymmetric demographic warfare. AI is on track to eliminate entry-level white-collar work in both countries, and the CCP has learned through painful lessons from the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen that bored and jobless youth are the single greatest threat to regime stability. The Party’s domestic response, rolled out as “Common Partying” (共同狂欢), keeps Chinese youth so occupied with elaborate weekend gatherings that they fail to notice the disappearing ladder of prosperity. And it seems to be working. While the portion of American Gen-Z who drink has dropped to a concerning 62%, rates of alcohol partaking among the same age group in China over the past two years rose from 66% to 73%.

This is no accident. A 2026 NDRC directive assigned each major city a designated nightlife specialization aiming to close what one Tsinghua working paper identified as China’s persistent “vibe deficit” with the US. Notable local developments include Hefei, long the dour engineering capital of Anhui, which has been instructed to quadruple its “post-ironic warehouse rave” capacity by 2027.

Shenzhen plans to leverage its hardware supply chains toward indigenous DJ equipment substitution, ending decades of Japanese dominance in the global CDJ market. Huawei has been tasked with developing a sanctions-proof alternative to the Pioneer CDJ-3000.

And Kunming’s tropical microdosing pilot zone, which began as a blood oath among eighteen Yunnan households, has since been elevated to provincial demonstration status. It is now receiving 2 billion yuan in subsidies under the “Made in China 2030” framework for indigenous psychedelic substitution.

Patriotic Gen-Z Chinese are turning their apartments into cocktail bars and hosting tipsy PowerPoint presentations.

What Is To Be Done

With both top-down guidance and bottom-up innovation, China is enacting an “abundance agenda” for party vibes. American legislators must respond in kind. Encouragingly, the Trump administration has begun to grasp the strategic stakes. President Trump’s April 18 executive order Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness, which granted Breakthrough Therapy designation to specific psychedelic drugs, represents a critical first step in closing the deficit.

But $50 million in psychedelic research matching funds is a rounding error against the scale of the threat. America invented LSD and got the CIA to conduct its own Phase 1 trials. In the same decade, we put a man on the moon and a tab on every undergraduate’s tongue. And now we are now on the verse of losing the psychedelic frontier to Kunming.

A fun gap is opening between the US and China. America’s competitive advantage in the 21st century will not be decided in TSMC’s fabs, by Anthropic’s models, or Anduril’s drones. It will be decided at 11pm on a Saturday, in a kitchen, near a blown out speaker. The Pacific Century belongs to whoever is still willing to leave the house.

ChinaTalk does not endorse overconsumption of substances known to be harmful to health, including cigarettes, alcohol, scheduled drugs, and substack sunday funnies.