Li Jianxiong was a highflying marketing executive in Beijing until a breakdown sent him to the west on a wellness voyage of discovery – just as his peers were losing faith in the Chinese Dream

Li Jianxiong is convinced he has lived two lives. His first began in 1984, when he was born to impoverished farmers in China’s Henan province. Ambitious and daring, he took full advantage of the new economic reality that unfolded after the cataclysms of the Mao years. By 2017, he had secured a family, a house in Beijing and a reputation as one of China’s most talented young marketing men. His success, however, came at a cost. By then, China had become notorious for its “996” work culture – 9am to 9pm, six days a week – but Li was working something closer to 007: 24 hours a day, every day. While managing an all-consuming media crisis for his employer, a major tutoring company, he developed insomnia, heart palpitations and a severe rash that doctors attributed to a flagging immune system. He wondered more than once whether he might actually work himself to death.

In Li’s telling, his second life began in 2018, when he left his lucrative job. Feeling broken and beleaguered, he treated himself as an experiment in self-rescue. He dabbled in Freud, read around in positive psychology, and familiarised himself with the writings of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. He absorbed biographies of Gandhi and Mother Teresa. He travelled to sacred Taoist sites in Hubei, an ecological healing village in Guizhou, a Buddhist charity house headquartered in Taiwan. He even moved to the US for a time, where he attended Christian self-development retreats and studied religion at Columbia University.