Meanwhile, conservatives spread 1950s Stepford tradwife nostalgia, and the Tech Right spams X with AI-generated cyberpunk. Even Trump’s gold-plated decadence is a kind of gaudy aspiration. These aesthetics don’t suit my taste, but I can at least conjure the pictures in my head. I know what daily life looks like in the worlds where they win. The left has no equivalent; we’ve lost the ability to articulate alternatives. The visioning muscle has atrophied after years of disuse.4 All we seem to do now is block and beg for help.

But since stumbling into this festival and soon thereafter down a bit of a Chinese folklore studies rabbit hole, I’ve been reminded that spirituality is not actually absent in China, just overlooked. This is in part because of a linguistic quirk. The closest Chinese equivalent to the English term “religion” is zongjiao (宗教), but the need for it only arose in the late 19th century, when scholars translating Western texts suddenly had to express this previously inexistent notion of an institutionalised belief system.