New love for old flaws

Buying time

But a price assumes there is something real to buy, and not everyone is trading in the same thing. Zheng is wary of the broader retro aesthetic. He sees little value in shops that assemble old televisions, enamel cups, bicycles and nostalgic snacks into an off-the-shelf version of the past. Without genuine content and quality, he said, nostalgia can become little more than interchangeable decoration.

That wariness is worth carrying to the other end of the scale, where the assembled past is being built as civic infrastructure. In Xiyang county, Shanxi province, a tourism project called "That Year in Xiyang" has recreated street scenes from the 1970s and 1980s, staging retro weddings, yangko folk dances and period performances. Wang Jingmei, head of the county's culture and tourism bureau, acknowledged the risk Zheng describes: immersive projects, she said, can end up copying the same sets and performances until there are "a thousand streets that look the same". Instead, the project tries to draw on local history and memory of daily life.

Betting on the past appears to be working. Since opening in July 2024, the project has averaged about 30,000 visits a day during holidays and about 5,000 on weekends, according to Ji Zhexian, a representative of the "That Year in Xiyang" project. Whether a whole street rebuilt to look like the past reads as the genuine article or as the interchangeable decoration Zheng warns against is a tension the retro economy has not resolved, but it's hard to notice when the past has been rebuilt as a place to eat, shop and watch performances.

Zheng doesn't consider his record store to be a nostalgia shop. To him, vinyl remains a living form of cultural consumption: musicians still release records, some older music is hard to find on digital platforms and a customer may be searching for an out-of-print album or a different way to listen.

He also sees the impulse in a longer historical context. Chinese scholars, he noted, have long collected paintings, calligraphy and inscriptions, and studied traces of the past; physical objects have always offered a way to connect with what came before. "The further technology moves forward, the more people realize that some things can't be fully replaced by efficiency," he said.

What that leaves, once the object is stripped of its price and its packaging, is mostly inconvenience, and for a certain kind of buyer, that's barely an issue at all. For Tang Weiyi, a 23-year-old photographer from Chengdu, film photography is about more than the final image. He buys relatively expensive slide film, then has to mail the roll out and wait for it to be developed. A roll shot at the beginning of the year may not come back until the end. The waiting has become part of the experience.

The old devices are all like this. Film requires development. Vinyl requires a turntable. A CCD camera requires choosing a device, transferring the images and sorting through the results. In a world where photos can be created, edited and shared almost instantly, and music skipped with a tap, those extra steps have become the product.

CCD cameras, vinyl records and film have not displaced smartphones, streaming platforms or digital photography. They offer something different: friction, waiting and a tangible connection between action and result. For young consumers who did not actually grow up in the eras they are revisiting, that may be the point. Instead of buying back the past, they are purchasing the time it takes to get there.

liuboqian@chinadaily.com.cn