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.

In April 2021, nine months after he returned to Beijing, Li founded a mutual-support community for burnouts that he called Heartify. The programme was loosely based on Alcoholics Anonymous, which he discovered while researching self-help groups in New York. Heartify began with 20 people meeting at a Taiwanese restaurant in Beijing’s 798 Art District. Today it employs 100 instructors, along with dozens of volunteers, to teach a “night school” that hosts classes and workshops dedicated to wellbeing. Customers pay the equivalent of £50 to attend six weekly two-hour seminars. Each course explores a different therapeutic method, from meditation and flower arranging to farming and ancient Chinese philosophy. In the three and a half years of Heartify’s existence, tens of thousands of people have participated in its programmes.