F E AT URE | BUSINESS & TECH
The Hoarder Next Door Living in an Uncertain World Drives Some People to Prepare for the Worse By Li Bowen
S
hanchen, who requested that we protect his identity, remembers exactly where he was when COVID-19 started spreading across the globe. He was sitting at home, mindlessly scrolling through his phone when a sudden sense of dread swept over him. In January 2020 there wasn’t much information on what would later become known as COVID-19, but Shanchen was a college student when SARS ran a rampage in South China. He had survived a pandemic once and he knew what he needed to do. Over the following three days, Shanchen snapped up necessities: bottled water, sanitizer, masks and nearly 1,000 kilograms of rice and flour. He ordered several types of anti-influenza drugs from pharmacies, including Lotus flower plague repellent capsules, or Lianhua Qingwen, a TCM drug that would later be used in China to treat COVID-19. “Hoarding should be a daily habit,” Shanchen says. “Not only because of the pandemic, but the world is changing. Now more than ever,
Images via Zxy
people feel a level of uncertainty towards the world.” Shanchen Xiansheng (@山辰先生) is a blogger on Xiaohongshu, or Little Red Book, China’s version of Instagram, with more than 8,000 followers. It was by accident that he became a ‘prepper blogger.’ One post he shared about his understanding of preparedness has generated more than 5,000 likes since it was published on April 10. “You need to think first and prepare in advance,” the father of a 3-year-old says. “It is not about saving money but keeping risks at bay from your family.” A prepper is someone who gathers materials and makes plans for a whole manner of uncontrollable events in advance. Preppers can range from the rational (like those who ensure they have enough stocks in the event of a snap lockdown) to the outrageous. There are groups in America preparing for the end of the world and the collapse of civilization as we know it. Although there is limited data on
the precise number of preppers here in China, Shanchen says roughly half of his followers abide by his rules and prepping lifestyle. A 2021 study suggested roughly 45% of Americans – or about 115.6 million people – say they spent money preparing or spent money on survival materials over the previous
Image via Shanchen AUGUST 2022 | 25
