People were still adjusting to the idea of a life outside of labor. Only two years had passed since China reduced the workweek from six days to five. Then it had redrawn the old socialist calendar to create something previously unimaginable: three weeks of vacation. Chinese academics greeted it with a new genre called “leisure studies,” dedicated to this “important stage in the social evolution of mankind.” One weekend, I joined Chinese classmates on a trip to Inner Mongolia. The train was overcrowded, and the ventilation system inhaled diesel exhaust and exhaled it into the cabins. But nobody
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