What works does not have to be new.

In the end, the response to the wave of Zhengzhou college students cycling 50 kilometers to Kaifeng at night relied on familiar methods: roads were restricted, bike-sharing platforms imposed limits, and the old logic of "the enemy is hidden among the people" reappeared in the form of claims that outside forces had infiltrated the riders and stirred up subversive sentiment.

The point here is not to debate the incident as a news event. What matters is the structure underneath it.

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Back in high school, many students have their own version of a final pre-exam frenzy. Maybe you have seen it too: stacks of test papers, workbooks, error notebooks, and reference books built up over three years suddenly get thrown from classroom windows, scattering like paper fireworks. It becomes a ritual for crossing into the identity of a "college student," as if adulthood begins the moment those pages leave your hands.

I remember something close to that in the final days before the college entrance exam. Our classrooms had to be moved because the building was being prepared as a test site. With the exam only two days away, no one really had the time or patience to drag around piles of mock papers and reference materials. Throwing them away felt easier. Then the question became: how?

One student tossed papers from the corridor into the building’s central courtyard. The fluttering sheets drew everyone’s attention. Then came a second student, a third, and before long more and more people joined in. The grade director stood downstairs with a loudspeaker shouting that anyone caught throwing trash would receive a warning, and that students should not ruin the final chapter of their three years in high school.

The louder the warnings became, the more enthusiastic the throwing got. Teachers rushed out of their offices to stop their classes. Some teachers, though, understood exactly what was happening and let it continue. To them, it was pressure release. After all, students had spent three years suffocating inside rules.

My own class hesitated because our homeroom teacher had already stopped us. Nobody knew whether we should join. Then I noticed the top-performing class on the same floor had started throwing their papers too. At that point I told my classmates they could go ahead.

The teacher later demanded to know why I had taken it upon myself to "give orders."

My answer was simple: once even the model students were doing it, the rules had lost their teeth. You could not make an example of anyone anymore.

The teacher was furious, but there was no clear way to punish me. I had not thrown a single paper myself.

That collective revelry was probably nothing more than students, repressed for three years, finally finding an outlet. But one question stayed with me: why did the so-called good students join too? Why would someone who had treasured every page of notes and every carefully organized test suddenly throw it all away at the last moment? It was absurd, and somehow beautiful.

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The night ride to Kaifeng followed almost the same emotional pattern.

At the beginning, it was only four students. They rode shared bikes from Zhengzhou to Kaifeng for fresh soup dumplings, posted their experience online, and summed it up with a phrase that struck a nerve: youth has no price tag. Then more and more college students copied them. By early November, the whole thing was abruptly shut down. Many universities in Zhengzhou seemed to snap overnight back into the control logic of the pandemic years: applications for staying out late, permission required to leave campus, restrictions returning almost by reflex.

Structurally, this looked a lot like that high-school paper-throwing ritual. Even the voices of opposition sounded eerily familiar. After the night-ride trend took off, one university teacher reportedly criticized it in a group chat in especially ugly terms, mocking the students as useless and contrasting them with other young people supposedly studying for CET exams, GRE, TOEFL, IELTS, internships, and computer certifications.

That kind of scolding misses the mechanism entirely. If you want to mobilize condemnation, simple insults are not even the most effective method. A much more reliable strategy is to create a hierarchy: make others feel they are above "those Henan students," give them a sense of superiority, and many will eagerly attack the riders in order to prove that their own test-prep, internships, and relentless self-discipline are the correct path. That is how exemplary punishment works socially, even when it is dressed up as moral judgment.

As for the students who joined the rides, many felt they were proving something through the act itself. Riding in a huge group at night, chanting, laughing, singing on the road—that looked and felt like the passion youth is supposed to have. Some people became even more eager to join after seeing teachers or online commentators berate students. In that sense, the ride turned into a symbolic confrontation with authority.

The crowds were not ideologically uniform. Some carried national flags and shouted nationalist slogans about unification with Taiwan. Others held signs invoking freedom and argued that youth should not be locked inside university walls. Once these symbolic byproducts appeared, people quickly began comparing the event to earlier moments in Chinese history, from the Red Guards’ mass travel during the Cultural Revolution to the 1989 student movement.

I do not think those comparisons really hold.

The Red Guards’ nationwide movement was not spontaneous; it followed political signals from above and developed into mass mobilization that disrupted transportation, cities, and the economy. The 1989 movement, whatever else one says about it, had recognizable political demands and a clear target. The Kaifeng night ride was something else. It was closer to an act of proof: a college student trying to prove that their youth is priceless by doing something that, at least on the surface, did not seem intended to directly inconvenience others. That is part of why they chose to set out at night, even in the middle of the night.

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The ride was only 50 kilometers, but its emotional structure brings to mind another journey, one measured not in dozens of kilometers but in thousands: the crossing of the United States from east to west.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, that kind of movement became one of the defining symbols of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road recorded both the journey and the restless inner life behind it. What were those travelers looking for?

The Beats were using travel, experiment, rebellion against mainstream culture, and the pursuit of freedom to prove that they existed in a meaningful way. Psychologically, this has a lot to do with identity formation. Identity is not only about how I see myself; it is also about being seen. A person who can barely survive a 1,000-meter fitness run may suddenly complete a 50-kilometer ride and feel they have surpassed their former self. And when that act takes place in a crowd, the individual is recognized through the group. People huddle together and warm one another inside a temporary mass.

Young people, especially college students, are particularly vulnerable to this dynamic because before they fully enter society, their social role and self-definition are still unsettled. Identity is still fluid, still confused, still under construction. So the forms through which they search for it can become highly varied. There is nothing inherently negative in saying that. Plenty of people, when they were young, invented strange rituals of their own.

There is also a neurological side to this. Before around age 25, the prefrontal cortex is still developing, which means risk assessment and self-control are not yet operating at their fully matured level. Young people therefore tend to seek novelty through activities that feel stimulating, even risky.

And then there is one more layer: resistance to authority.

The Beats were treated by mainstream society as failures or social waste. In response, they had to demonstrate their abilities, or at least their different way of being alive. The same logic applies here. Without the teacher’s insults, without the mockery and the praise circulating online, the riders probably would not have grown from four people into thousands. They were not only proving something to themselves; they were also pushing back against authority in symbolic form.

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Once the night rides were stopped, imitations began appearing in other cities as well. One move led to another. Universities will almost certainly continue introducing rules against cycling or related collective activities. But under an absurd social atmosphere, pressure rarely produces obedience alone. More often, it produces even more absurd rituals in return.

That pattern should already be familiar. The final year of the three pandemic years in China saw absurdity reach a kind of climax in Shanghai in 2022. Later, even Halloween celebrations in Shanghai were banned. When a society becomes this tense, even play starts to look dangerous.

The key word here is absurd.

Camus argued that the world itself is absurd. That absurdity becomes one source of human pain, and one answer to it is to live fully in the present. If the future feels opaque, if expectation itself has become unstable, then perhaps one throws oneself into the immediate moment instead.

For college students facing a murky future, graduation no longer appears as a smooth passage into adult life. A diploma may look less like an entry ticket than the starting point of unemployment. In that atmosphere, a 50-kilometer ride becomes more than a ride. It becomes a way to prove oneself, to find warmth inside a temporary crowd, and even to resist authority by stepping beyond the isolated individual.

That is why a mere 50 kilometers can matter. Not because the distance is extraordinary in itself, but because of what it condenses. Under different conditions, one could imagine this kind of impulse scaling far beyond 50 kilometers.

This same philosophy of absurdity also answers the question I carried from high school: why did the good students throw their papers too? Because in that moment they were also inhabiting the present as intensely as they could. What was absurd there? The distortions of exam-driven education, perhaps. The fantasy of freedom that had been strangled for years, perhaps. Or maybe the sudden realization that a life organized only around scores had left them with nothing else to chase.

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That is also why the event can be described as something like the REM phase of a collective spring dream.

REM is the stage before deep sleep in which the eyes move rapidly, the brain becomes intensely active, and dreaming begins. Sometimes the body even twitches in response.

The Kaifeng ride, like the Beat Generation’s journeys across America, was a trip shaped by wandering and searching. Wandering and freedom both belong to the realm of collective unconscious desire. In the current historical atmosphere—employment pressure, unemployment anxiety, economic slowdown, visible cracks in social stability—that desire is under strain. Pressure seeks an outlet, and eventually it finds a ritualized form.

The night ride was only one such form. It mattered because it set other movements in motion, like a twitch before a dream fully takes hold.

And if there is still no awakening at that point, what follows may not be release at all, but a deeper sleep from which waking becomes harder and harder.

A sleep without dreams.

And without hope.