By Jane Sonnenschein · First drafted January 5, 2026 · Revised September 18, 2026

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Søren Kierkegaard

Prologue | Why I Kept Going Back to Weishang¹

If you only looked at what happened later, it would be easy to see my years in weishang as just another attempt at starting a business. But looking back now, I can see that there was a very specific set of circumstances that led me down that path.

My daughter was born in 2017. At the time, Chris was struggling with severe depression as well as migraines and other health problems. Our child was still very young, and we had no parents nearby who could help us. Much of the responsibility for the family naturally fell on me.

I had to look after a small child while also finding a way to keep the household financially afloat.

Before having a child, I had already spent years working in import and export. When I was with my former partner, we mainly imported goods from China and sold them in Germany. After my daughter was born, I simply no longer had the time or energy to maintain a business operation of that size on my own. So I gradually changed direction and began trying to sell German products to customers in China instead.

It was around that time that I started getting involved in weishang.

The first thing I sold was diapers. Looking back, that model actually suited my situation quite well: once a customer or an agent below me placed an order, the system shipped it directly, so I did not have to handle much inventory or logistics myself.

Later I sold lipsticks, then moved on to other products. The last project I joined was an underwear business, and that was also the one in which I invested the most money.

Why did I keep moving from one project to another?

For a long time, I had one answer for myself: because I had never really tried hard enough.

There was a very familiar way of explaining failure inside the weishang world. If you were not succeeding, there was always a reason. You were not posting often enough on WeChat Moments—the social feed inside WeChat, China’s all-in-one messaging and social app. You were not contacting enough people. You were too concerned about losing face. You were not persuasive enough, not persistent enough, or simply had not invested enough money.

And I was exactly the kind of person who found it very easy to believe that explanation.

Objectively speaking, I was not someone who could easily build a business out of an existing network of friends and acquaintances.

I left China when I was around twenty. Even before I left, I did not have many close friends, and I was never especially close to most of my classmates. After living abroad for many years, many of those relationships gradually faded even further.

I am also not someone who quickly becomes familiar with people or easily builds a large social circle. So when I eventually started trying to sell through WeChat Moments, I immediately felt the disadvantage.

At that time, many daigou businesses and weishang businesses began with people you already knew. Friends, classmates, neighbors and relatives would first see what you were selling on WeChat Moments, and those relationships would gradually become your first customer base.

Today, it feels completely normal to reach strangers through Xiaohongshu—a Chinese lifestyle and social discovery platform often compared loosely to a mix of Instagram and Pinterest—short-video platforms, or other social media. But when I first started doing this kind of business, those channels were either still in their early stages or I simply had no concept of “using social media to bring in new customers.”

So for someone like me, whose existing social network was already rather quiet, getting a business started was naturally much slower.

If I had been able to accept that at the time, perhaps things would have been much simpler. In reality, if I had continued steadily with the daigou business, built up customers slowly and kept posting consistently, it might well have developed into a reasonably stable business over time.

But I was not willing to accept that.

I kept thinking the problem must be me.

Why could other people talk so confidently on WeChat Moments, constantly meet new people and seem able to rally a whole group around them, while I could not?

Was I too worried about what people thought of me? Was I not proactive enough? Was I simply not good enough at talking to people? If I pushed myself a little harder, could I eventually become someone like them?

Looking back now, I realize that this was one of the most important reasons I kept entering one weishang project after another.

Of course I wanted to make money.

The financial pressure on our family was real, and my child was very young. If I could earn an income while still being able to look after her, that was not only practical for me; it seemed almost ideal.

That is also one very real reason why so many mothers with young children in China were drawn to weishang. When you have to care for a child yourself and cannot easily return to a conventional full-time job, a business that appears to be manageable from your phone and allows you to arrange your own time can be extremely attractive.

For me, that need was even stronger.

Chris’s physical and mental health were unstable, his work was not available every month, and we had no parents nearby to help us. By the time my daughter was about one year old, even though I was still at home caring for her, I had already started registering businesses and looking for ways to earn money again.

I found it very difficult to simply stay at home and watch our savings slowly disappear. At the time, it barely even occurred to me to apply for government assistance. My immediate thought was simply: I need to find a way to earn money myself.

So in the beginning, weishang really did seem to offer a solution that suited my circumstances.

But looking back now, I also know that money was never the whole reason I kept returning to it.

There was something deeper.

I wanted to change myself.

I wanted to become the kind of person who could talk to anyone, manage relationships effortlessly, and walk into a room and quickly gather people around her.

I admired people who seemed energetic and magnetic, the kind of people who could say something and have others immediately respond. Somewhere inside me, I believed that if I could one day become that kind of person, perhaps it would not only change the way I did business. Maybe it would change the whole direction of my life.

So whenever something failed, I rarely stopped to ask myself, “Is this way of working actually right for me?”

Instead, I asked, “Have I still not truly broken through my own limitations?”

If one project did not work, I moved on to another. If I had not invested enough the first time, I would invest more the next time. If I still had not become the person I imagined I should be, I would try again.

The last time, with the underwear business, I put in more money than ever before and went much deeper into the system.

It took me many years to understand that I had been trying to solve two completely different problems at the same time.

One was practical: I needed a way to earn money while still being able to care for my child.

The other came from my dissatisfaction with my own personality. I wanted to use a business system to turn myself into a different kind of person.

For years, I mixed those two things together.

And that was why, when one of the most powerful people from that old world suddenly contacted me again many years later, I finally had enough distance to see the narrative that had once made me question myself over and over again.

A few days ago, someone I had not spoken to in years suddenly sent me a message.

She first asked whether I was still living in Germany and whether I had a job. After a little small talk, she casually told me that she had recently found a new project with a very low entry cost. It would take only 599 yuan to get started.

When I saw the message, I did not feel much of anything.

I was not angry, and I was not tempted.

It felt more like someone had suddenly opened a page in a book I had closed many years ago.

But the person contacting me was not just some ordinary weishang seller from my past.

She Had Once Been at the Top of a Team of Ten Thousand

Without knowing where she once stood in that system, it would be easy to underestimate what it meant for her to contact me again.

At the height of the company’s success, she and another male leader were among the first people to build very large teams. The man still worked in a government department at the time, while she became one of the most visible female leaders in the entire organization.

She was an exceptionally persuasive speaker. She knew how to promote things, organize people and create excitement within a team. Her studio operation became very large, and eventually the agents beneath her numbered in the tens of thousands.

Within that company, her team was one of the best-known and most successful.

To agents lower down in the organization, she was no longer simply someone’s upline. She was one of the “big names” whose story was constantly used as an example for others to study and admire.

Back then, not everyone could simply add her on WeChat. Usually you had to reach a fairly high distributor level before you were allowed into her circle, supposedly so that you could “learn from the top leaders.”

My own upline admired her enormously.

So if we judge her purely by the standards of that system, she was absolutely not someone who had failed at weishang.

Quite the opposite. She had reached a level of success that the overwhelming majority of ordinary agents could never come close to, and she had made a great deal of money.

That was exactly why what happened later became so interesting to me.

Not long after the pandemic began, she and the company eventually went their separate ways. To this day, I do not know the full story of why their relationship broke down.

At the time, it caused a considerable stir inside the organization.

The company was very strict about leaders who left the system. Once an upline left, the agents beneath that person were generally expected to cut ties with them and were not supposed to follow the former leader out of the company.

My own upline had once admired this woman so much, yet she eventually deleted her from WeChat as well.

By then I was already gradually withdrawing from that world myself, so I never made a point of cleaning up those old relationships. I simply never deleted her.

That was probably why, years later, she still had me in her contacts.

I heard different versions of why she finally broke with the company.

Within the original company, people did not speak kindly about her departure. My own upline also had her own interpretation when we later talked about it.

But according to things this former leader herself said publicly afterward, she had become increasingly uncomfortable with the way the weishang model had developed.

In her view, as the business matured, the people who could still reliably make money were increasingly concentrated at the top of the pyramid. Meanwhile, many ordinary agents—especially mothers with young children—had to keep putting in more money simply to move up a level, gain a better margin and remain competitive within the system.

That part, at least, was something I had experienced myself.

As I remember it, many distributor levels were directly tied to how much inventory you purchased.

Even the earlier upgrades required investments in the tens of thousands of yuan. Moving further upward into the higher distributor tiers could mean putting in more than 100,000 yuan.

I once found myself in an awkward position because I had recruited an agent of my own. At our existing levels, there was very little difference between our margins. If I wanted to become a meaningful upline to her and earn a larger margin, I had to invest significantly more money myself and move up another level.

The structure itself constantly encouraged people to keep increasing their stake.

Then the pandemic arrived, and the business became much harder.

According to this former leader’s own account, she saw many mothers investing large sums of money while finding it increasingly difficult to sell the products. The inventory they were left holding could not simply be returned to the company.

She later described her break with the company as something she could no longer accept. She had begun to feel that the money she earned at the top of the pyramid ultimately depended on large numbers of people below her taking on the risk.

Was that the whole truth of what happened?

I do not know.

I do not have enough information to decide exactly what happened between her and the company, or why she was ultimately willing to walk away from a team that had already grown to tens of thousands of people.

The reality may have been far more complicated than any of the versions that later circulated.

But there was one thing I could see for myself over the years that followed.

After leaving the company, she did not stop trying to do business.

She worked with WeChat Channels—the short-video and livestreaming feature inside WeChat. She tried weight-loss products, dental-health-related projects, and later several other ventures.

She was still the same person who could talk exceptionally well, and she was still very good at promotion. You could see from her social media that the communication skills, charisma and drive that had once helped her build a huge team had not suddenly disappeared when she left the company.

And yet none of those later projects ever came close to reproducing what she had built before.

That was why, when a woman who had once stood at the top of a team of ten thousand suddenly went back through her old contacts years later, found me, asked whether I was still in Germany and whether I had a job, and then told me about another “low-barrier opportunity” that cost only 599 yuan to join, I began to look at her earlier success differently.

I do not think she lacked ability.

Quite the opposite.

Anyone capable of organizing and leading a team of that size clearly has strong skills in communication, persuasion, promotion, organization and motivating other people.

But that is exactly where the question begins.

If someone who once built a team of ten thousand leaves that particular platform while keeping the same speaking ability, experience, drive and years of knowledge about the business, yet never manages to reproduce that scale again, then I have to ask:

How much of her success came from her personally, and how much came from that particular moment in history, from the system the company had already built, and from the momentum of an era when weishang itself was expanding rapidly?

When we were inside the system, we almost never thought about success this way.

When we saw someone standing at the top, it felt natural to explain everything we saw as personal qualities: she was talented, she was capable, she worked harder than everyone else.

Once someone succeeds, we are very quick to attribute the entire result to the individual.

But over time, I began to understand that ability matters without ever operating in a vacuum.

Certain abilities, when they meet exactly the right moment and exactly the right structure, can be amplified tenfold or even more. Once that environment disappears, the same person, with the same charisma and the same willingness to work, may never achieve the same result again.

Her reappearance after all those years gave me the chance to look at the whole thing from outside the system for the first time.

After I finally left that world myself, the last time I spoke to my old upline was at the end of 2021. Since then, my life has moved in a completely different direction, and weishang has long stopped being part of my world.

That distance mattered.

Because when this former leader of a ten-thousand-person team appeared in my WeChat again, the first question in my mind was no longer, “Is this project worth doing?”

Instead, I found myself asking something I had never seriously asked before:

If a business model is genuinely still growing and moving forward, why does it need to come back years later and search for people who left long ago?

Once that question appeared, I could not ignore it.

So I went back and looked through the social media posts of some of the people from that old circle, curious to see what had become of the business we had once believed in so strongly.

Back then, underwear had been the company’s core product. I remember how often people talked about professionalism, branding, the status of the industry and all the room it supposedly had to grow.

Years later, much of that language had faded.

Now the posts were filled with new products, new projects and new selling points: collagen powder, skincare products, and all kinds of claims about looking younger or being in a “better state.”

Whether those products themselves were good or bad was no longer the thing that interested me most.

What stopped me was the familiarity of the narrative.

The products could change. The story could change. But every time, there was still a new “opportunity,” a new “window,” and the same suggestion that if you did not seize it now, you might miss something important.

That was when I began to realize that what had once trapped me was never simply one particular product.

What had trapped me was an entire way of explaining success, opportunity and effort.

When a system still has genuine room for new growth, it naturally attracts new people and expands outward.

But when it increasingly needs to search old contact lists, return to people who left years ago, and tell them once again that “there is a new opportunity,” then at the very least, something in the old growth model has changed.

That was the moment when I finally shifted my attention away from the question I had asked myself for years—

“Why didn’t I succeed back then?”

—and toward a different one:

How did the success we saw back then actually happen?

Once I began thinking about it that way, I felt a little more understanding toward the person I had been.

For years, when I looked back on that period, part of me still wondered whether I had simply failed to persist. Maybe I had not been tough enough. Maybe I had not worked hard enough.

When something does not work out, it is very easy to place the entire explanation inside yourself. You begin to imagine that if only you had held on a little longer or pushed yourself a little harder, the story might have ended completely differently.

But now, I increasingly believe that I did not leave simply because I “failed to persist.”

I was never truly suited to that logic.

I am not good at constantly using up my personal relationships for business. I am not comfortable exchanging vague promises about the future for someone else’s trust in the present.

And I do not like being in a situation where I have to carry the risk myself while the things that are actually certain remain in someone else’s hands.

The truth is, I already knew some of this back then.

I just was not confident enough to trust what I knew.

I did not dare to admit that perhaps the real question was not, “Why can’t I do this well?”

Perhaps the question was, “What if this way of doing things simply does not suit me?”

So this time, when that former power player appeared again, I did not spend hours analyzing the project or comparing whether it might be worth trying.

It was not because I had suddenly become superior, or because I imagined I had somehow risen above everyone else.

I simply knew very clearly that this was no longer a place I wanted to return to.

Years ago, I might have seen an invitation like this as another opportunity.

I might have seriously asked myself: Should I try again? What if this time is different? What if the only reason other people succeeded and I did not was because I gave up too soon?

I no longer need to prove myself that way.

Some experiences are not there so that we can reopen the case years later and decide whether our younger selves were right or wrong.

Sometimes you walk a very long way, and then someone unexpectedly points back toward an old crossroads. And in that moment, you realize with surprising calm that you simply do not want to take that road anymore.

So when that former weishang leader contacted me again, I did not feel regret.

I did not find myself wondering, “What if I had stayed?”

I simply became certain of one thing.

What I walked away from back then was not just a so-called opportunity.

I walked away from an entire way of life that would have kept me in conflict with myself for years.

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Notes

1. Wēishāng (微商) — Literally “micro-commerce,” weishang became a widely used term in China during the 2010s for selling products through personal social networks, especially through WeChat and its Moments feed. It could refer broadly to ordinary social selling, but many businesses also developed layered distributor and agency systems in which participants bought inventory, recruited agents beneath them, and moved through different sales ranks. In this essay, the term refers specifically to the kind of distributor-based system the author personally experienced.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 微商大佬再次找上我，我终于看清了这套叙事

German version: Als sich eine frühere Weishang-Größe wieder bei mir meldete, verstand ich endlich die Erzählung dahinter