Cliff, Thomas2014-05-192014-05-19http://hdl.handle.net/1885/11684Prologue: A Sort of Darkness There’s a man who sits selling spicy tofu and vegetables on skewers in a not-yet redeveloped area, no more than thirty30 metres wide, between Beijing University and the Ffourth Rring road. Beyond the twelve12 or fourteen14 lines of traffic to his south is the hyper-modernity of Zhongguancun, but he finds his place in this liminal strip: anti-aspiration between aspirational heights. He is no longer young, but not- yet middle aged. He stays in that one spot for twelve12 hours a day, midday to midnight, every day. When he is not actively serving a customer, he just sits there, almost motionless and completely expressionless; he doesn’t look happy or sad, and my chest tightens each time I walk past.Copyright Information: Copyright the author.Copyright the author. This website and the China Story Yearbook are open-access materials published under a Creative Commons 3.0 Unported license. We encourage the widespread circulation of the material published on this website. While all content may be used and copied, we request that you credit The China Story Project and provide a link to: www.TheChinaStory.org. We occasionally publish images from other websites; we do this under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; if you are a rights owner and object to our use of an image, please let us know via our contact page. (viewed 27/02/2017)social changeinequalitycapitalismexistentialismphoto essay2014-02-182020-11-08