Are You Dead Yet?
The controversial Chinese app and the nihilism that fuels its popularity
Are You Dead Yet? If you have to ponder that question, chances are you are still on this mortal plane (though with each mind-boggling development from the White House, I find myself questioning reality more and more…)
The question has triggered days of debate in China because it’s the name of the year’s hottest app so far – 死了么 (Si Le Me). The app is incredibly simple: every day, you check in with the homepage’s big green button. Fail to check in for 48 hours and it will email an emergency contact that you’d shared at set up. The target audience are young people who live alone, of which there are tens of millions in China. The founders got the idea from online forums in which young urbanites would share their deep fears of dying alone – and undiscovered.
I write about the phenomenon in my latest column, arguing that beyond the practical but bleak service that the app offers, its success also comes down to the sheer genius of its name. It starts conversations, doesn’t it? And especially in a country like China, where it is still incredibly taboo to talk about death (such that the number ‘4’, si, is still often missing from hotel numbers because it sounds similar to the word for death).
But the precise appeal of the app to young people is its subversiveness. I argue that this is just the latest example of the nihilistic sense of humour that characterise Chinese millennials and Gen Zs, where they can but face the pressures of life with a smile:
From an upbringing as only children, the sole vessels of their parents’ misplaced hopes and failed dreams, to a school system that at times resembles battery farming more than preparation for life, to finding that jobs aren’t easy to get or hold on to as they graduate into record high unemployment, it seems to this generation that endless competition is the only way to survive.
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Humour is one way to highlight these pressures and to help endure them. So when a toy manufacturer, producing horse plushies for the upcoming Year of the Horse, accidentally sewed its smiling mouth upside down, the resulting sad horse went viral for its adorable tragedy. “Cry Cry Horse” was “just like the way I feel at work”, one buyer said.
A few years ago, alternative graduation photos were all the rage, where new grads staged pictures of themselves in gowns and mortarboards face-planted on the steps outside the lecture hall, or chucking their thesis in the recycling. In some ways, this nihilism explains also the popularity of Labubu, the toothy monster toys that took the world by storm last year. Its original appeal lay in its subversive ugliness.
Read on to find out more about the app, its founders and why (I think) it mysteriously disappeared from app stores last week.
London’s Chinese embassy row
The other thing that’s been on my mind is the continuing row over the new site of the Chinese embassy in London, which has renewed as we get closer to the January 20th deadline that the government had set for making a decision on its approval.
Keen readers will know that I believe, with the security services’ approval as of last year, the embassy should be approved. That’s been a, hmm, controversial take, let’s say. But in the last week two more voices have come out to make the rare argument in support of the embassy: Charles Parton, a former diplomat and security-minded think tanker in London, who you will have heard on episodes of Chinese Whispers before, and Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, a unit of GCHQ.
Charlie speaks to TalkTV below, and has, earlier today, expounded his view in a Substack:
And you can read Ciaran Martin’s assessment in The Times here:
Finally there is concern over communications cables running close to the proposed site. Two points are relevant here. First, the security services (in this case MI5 and GCHQ) will have been asked to make a highly classified assessment of the operational risks and benefits of this particular proposal. It’s now more than five years since I stepped down as the head of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, so I have not seen that assessment. But I can say with confidence that no government would override their advice were they to say the risks were too great. In October, Sir Ken McCallum, MI5’s boss, referred to his agency’s century of experience of and deep expertise in dealing with the national security risks from the presence of foreign embassies on British soil.
Second, the characterisation of this one area of cables as uniquely sensitive and vulnerable is simplistic. There is a huge amount of sensitive infrastructure all over London. Defending the capital’s cables and other infrastructure from multiple threats is very complex, often highly classified work across many parts of the city. Physical access is only one part of the challenge. If anyone thinks that rejecting this proposal and moving the embassy to, say, Belgravia is the key to making London’s cable infrastructure safe, I have a London bridge to sell them.
This is very similar to my argument, which you can read here if you missed previously. I also appeared on The Times’s The Story podcast to discuss at length.
Ultimately, the site will not be without risk. But the question is whether the risk is enough to justify reneging on a sale that went through six years ago that will undoubtedly anger Beijing. And given recent developments stateside, I think it’s more important than ever that Britain is nimble, pragmatic and strategic in our dealings with China – and indeed, the US. That means not burning any bridges unnecessarily as we navigate this new, uncertain world.
Photo of the week has to be this from Carl Zha – a retro home snap of Xi Jinping with his wife Peng Liyuan, and Xi’s parents. The public images of Chinese leaders are so carefully manicured and protected (and especially the case for Xi) that this is a rare insight into Xi as a son and husband.
He is also the spitting image of his mother!
As a Torygraph reader (it's cheaper than the Times) I have been given the full anti Royal Mint embassy treatment. Glad to get a course correction from you. If and when we get to the point of distrusting the Security Services, then (for some of us) it's all over.