Niu Lai

In the summer of 2026, a Chinese animated film called Niu Lai (牛来, after its calf hero) opened in theatres. No marketing, no trailer. In its first ten days it took in a little over 7,700 yuan and was seen by fewer than 300 people in the entire country.

It is astonishingly crude. Stiff 3D models, mechanical movements, and an opening shot of a lark circling the sky for five minutes. The director, Xin Yumeng, is 34. He trained in landscape architecture, never studied animation, and made the film with software meant for drawing garden plans.

The film was made almost entirely by two people: him and his mother, Sun Lifang. For five years the son modelled, animated, edited and voiced; the mother wrote the script, voiced every female character, and taught herself composition to write the whole score and the closing song. The production company used to be a renovation firm. The distributor, a friend, urged him not to release it in theatres. He answered that it had taken too much to make.

The story is simple. A newborn calf cannot stand. Exhausted, he falls asleep and dreams. In the dream the wolves come, and his mother sacrifices herself to lead them away from the herd; grown up, the calf in turn gives his life for his own. Then he wakes, stands, and walks, step by step, toward the herd.

At first his parents thought he was mad. Then they told him what so many Chinese parents tell their children: do what you can.

It was the closing song that made me think of Shostakovich’s Second Waltz. Written and sung by the mother, it has the lilt of a Russian folk tune; many Chinese of her generation grew up on Soviet songs. The waltz is ballroom music, glittering and turning, but something heavy lies under the melody, like sadness behind a smile. The song is like that.

The film fails from start to finish. But a mother spending five years helping her son finish a dream that everyone laughed at: that is real. In the film the mother dies for the herd; outside it, she writes songs for her son. Both are real.

That is what I want to write about. For lack of a better word, I will call it heart.

What I mean by heart

Heart is not honesty. A person can never tell a lie and still care about nothing. Honesty means not deceiving; heart means staking your whole self.

A mother’s love for her child is heart in its purest form. It has no audience: when no one is watching, she loves just the same. It expects nothing back: she does not love her child because he will one day repay her. And it needs no reason: ask a mother why she loves her child and she cannot answer, nor does she need to. Heart always points toward something that no longer needs to be justified.

In human history, it was religion that supplied this something: an absolute, larger and truer than oneself, to which a person could give himself entirely. That is why so many of those who took up arms in God’s name, from the Crusaders to the Taiping, were sincere. They wanted more than bread; they wanted a true world.

Some will say the fanatic is sincere too. He is not. A person with heart is honest with himself: he doubts, he suffers, he lies awake asking whether he was wrong. The fanatic no longer doubts; he has handed his thinking over to a slogan and no longer faces himself. Fanaticism is not too much heart. It is another kind of falseness.

A morality without roots

Our society does not lack moral vocabulary. Equality, inclusion, diversity, progress, rights: there has never been more of it. But there is nothing underneath.

At the opening of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre imagines a catastrophe that destroys the natural sciences. The survivors find only fragments of formulas and terms, which they go on reciting without knowing what whole they once belonged to. Our moral language, he says, is in that state. We still say “good,” “duty,” “dignity,” but the world that gave those words their meaning, the one that answered why we live and what a human being should become, is gone.

The American philosopher Elton Trueblood called this a “cut-flower civilization”: in the vase, the flower lasts a while, but it has no roots. Tom Holland, in Dominion, puts it more bluntly: the best of our secular values grew out of Christianity before the root was cut.

The words remain, the roots are gone, and only two things are left: posturing and transaction. Saying the right thing buys safety and approval; everything is negotiable, nothing is beyond exchange. People follow this morality not out of conviction but out of fear of being shut out.

In The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel described a greengrocer who places a sign in his shop window: “Workers of the world, unite!” He never gives a thought to what it says, and the passers-by do not even read it. The sign is only a token of loyalty: belief is optional, compliance is not, and so everyone puts one up. The whole system rested on this shared untruth. Today no one forces us to put up signs. We do it ourselves. The slogan has changed; the window is the same.

Deeper still: in secular progressive morality, everything must be justified and everything can be overturned. What is right today will be wrong tomorrow. It calls this openness. In fact it means that nothing in this morality deserves to be loved unconditionally. A mother need not justify her love; a morality in which everything demands justification cannot be loved that way, and so it cannot give anyone heart.

The universal and the particular

What kind of community can hold heart? My test is this: it rests on a universal conviction that anyone can join fully, provided they truly believe it.

The French Republic says: you are a citizen. It does not ask who your ancestors were or where you were born; it asks whether you make its principles your own. Rousseau devoted a chapter of The Social Contract to “civil religion,” and France built it a temple: across the front of the Panthéon run the words Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante, “to its great men, a grateful nation.” For Renan, a nation is “a daily plebiscite”: it rests on consent renewed every day, not on blood.

The United States is the other example. Chesterton called America the only nation in the world founded on a creed, “a nation with the soul of a church.” “All men are created equal” is an article of faith: believe it and you are American. American exceptionalism, at bottom, is this: a nation that believes it carries a mission for all of humanity.

Both traditions are secular, but they kept the skeleton of religion: an absolute conviction, a call addressed to everyone, something worth dying for. That is why they can ask for heart.

Against them stands particular identity: language, ancestry, memory, “us.” A particular identity does not ask you to believe anything, only to belong. And belonging requires no heart. It is inherited.

The universal is accused of arrogance and fanaticism, of waging war in the name of humanity. But a conviction, however dangerous, is still a conviction; a shell, however harmless, is still a shell. The deeper sickness is the second.

Québec: the container without the content

I live in Québec. By this test, it is the clearest example of an empty shell I know.

It was not always empty. Before the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, Québec was the most Catholic society in North America. Language and faith went together; people used to say that the language was the guardian of the faith. The formula is Henri Bourassa’s: the nationalist leader argued it in his 1910 speech at Notre-Dame in Montréal, and in 1918 gave a lecture under that very title. French was defended because it carried a faith, a whole understanding of why we live.

And “catholic” means universal. Pre-1960 Québec was a particular people within a universal Church: its language and history were the particular half, its faith the universal half.

The Quiet Revolution threw out the universal half and kept the particular one. The churches emptied, then became condos, libraries, concert halls. The language stayed, defended more fiercely than ever. But it went from container to end in itself: people guard the bottle with everything they have, while what it held was poured out long ago.

The Québec sociologist Fernand Dumont spent his life asking what, once a shared faith is taken away, could still hold an “us” together. Québec has still not answered.

Québec will say: we have laïcité. In 2019, Bill 21 wrote the secularism of the state into law. But the law only says what Québec refuses: religious symbols on certain public employees, the return of the old Church. Something founded on a refusal is a defence, not a conviction. Laïcité says what Québec is not; it cannot say what Québec is.

Québec will also say: we have civic nationalism; French is a door open to all, and anyone who learns it and takes part in common life becomes Québécois. But a door is worth what lies behind it. When the Republic says “you are a citizen,” behind it stands a whole conception of the human being. When Québec says “you speak French,” what stands behind it? French.

Québec’s intellectuals have long condemned Canadian multiculturalism as hollow relativism that welcomes everything and is therefore nothing. That sentence can be handed back to them word for word.

Postnational Canada, and elsewhere

If Québec is a shell, Canadian multiculturalism is emptier still. Québec at least defends one thing with everything it has. Canada has given up even that, and calls the surrender a virtue.

In 2015, Justin Trudeau told The New York Times Magazine that Canada has no core identity and no mainstream, that Canadians share values instead, such as openness, respect and compassion, and that this makes Canada the first postnational state. He said it with pride. Openness, respect, compassion: these words are not wrong, they are empty. They ask no one to give himself. A community that welcomes everything ends up demanding nothing, and so it ends up being nothing.

Canadian conservatism, too, long defined itself by not being American. In 1965, in Lament for a Nation, George Grant was already mourning that tradition’s collapse. A country founded on what it is not has, like Québec’s laïcité, a defence and no calling.

When nothing is believed in common, only interests remain. Confederation becomes a bargaining session between Ottawa and the provinces; the West becomes a resource reserve to be drilled. Immigration, which ought to be an invitation into a shared life, has become in Canada a way to supply labour: to hold down the cost of work, the elites open the door to the whole world.

The numbers are there. At the 2021 census, Canada had fewer than one million non-permanent residents (temporary workers, international students, asylum claimants and others), 2.5 percent of the population. By the fall of 2024, Statistics Canada estimated more than three million, over 7 percent. In the low-wage stream of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, Ottawa approved about 28,000 positions in 2019 and about 84,000 in 2023, three times as many, with cooks and cashiers near the top of the list. Immigration Minister Marc Miller admitted that Canadian employers had become “addicted” to temporary foreign workers. In October 2024, Justin Trudeau conceded that his government “didn’t get the balance quite right,” cut the 2025 target for permanent residents from 500,000 to 395,000, and set a goal of bringing temporary residents back down to 5 percent of the population.

When a country takes someone in, is it inviting him to become something, or does it only need him to do something? Canada’s answer is the second.

The United States and France once had something, but they are losing it. Trump-era America is retreating from a creed you join by believing to an identity of birth and blood; it is taking Québec’s road. France as well: when the republican ideal shrinks to administrative rules on secularism, the shell is not far off.

The laughter

What happened to Niu Lai after its release says more than the film itself.

It became a sensation, passing 63 million yuan by mid-September, but as a joke. People did not go to watch it; they went to be seen at it, to shout “Mama!” along with the calf and film it all on their phones. The title was read as “the bull market is coming,” and stock traders bought tickets for luck. Brands selling bubble tea, milk and sauces rushed out deliberately crude copycat ads. Rumours piled up: money laundering, subsidy fraud; AI was used to fake interviews and clips. Abroad, a pirated copy was screened to paying audiences in San Francisco. Someone even launched a cryptocurrency in its name.

Five years of a mother’s and a son’s heart became, in this world’s hands, three things: a meme, clicks, and a business.

Most of the people laughing meant no harm. That is exactly the problem. A hollow society can only receive heart through irony. It does not know where to put it, so it laughs; and when it has finished laughing, it sells it. Irony is the mother tongue of the empty shell.

Some were moved, of course, and called it the most sincere film of the year. But they often had to laugh first before they could say it. Today, admitting that something sincere has moved you requires first proving that you find it ridiculous. Otherwise you look naive.

What remains

Shostakovich spent almost his whole life under a regime that demanded a performance from him. In 1936 an editorial in Pravda denounced his opera as “muddle instead of music”; in 1948 he was condemned again. He made his self-criticisms, issued statements, read speeches others had written for him. He said everything he was supposed to say.

But his music did not lie. The Second Waltz is, on the surface, a light-hearted ball; underneath, a sorrow that cannot be spoken. He hid his heart where the regime could not find it, or pretended not to.

Heart does not change regimes. Shostakovich did not change the Soviet Union, and Niu Lai will change no one. But regimes pass, slogans change, the right words go out of fashion, one joke replaces another. A melody that hides its sorrow under glitter, a song a mother wrote for her son: these remain.

At the end of Niu Lai, the calf wakes from his dream, stands up, and walks alone toward the herd.

This is what we can do: in an empty shell, begin by not being one.

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