Discussion keeps the world turning.
This is Roundtable.
Think about something you throw away every day without a second thought.
Now imagine that thing takes 400 years to disappear.
That's the reality with tennis balls, and we go through millions of them.
But there's some good news.
In Qingdao, they've figured out how to turn 20,000 dead balls into something that you can actually play on.
We'll tell you all about that today.
And then, imagine a college student who's never sent a formal email in their entire life.
They grew up on WeChat, on DMs, on messages that start with hey and end with nothing.
And then one day they're expected to email a professor or a company and no one ever taught them how.
Well, that's driving professors and employers crazy.
The issue of young people not knowing how to write an email has gone viral in China.
Is it their fault?
Coming to you from our studios in Beijing, this is Roundtable.
I'm Steve Hatherly.
Thanks for joining us this episode.
And for today's show, I'm with Yushun and Yushan.
Yushun, Yushan, good afternoon to you both.
I'm excited about our topic today because we get to talk about tennis, kind of.
Not a tennis player, though.
Never.
Are you a tennis fan?
Well, oh my gosh, I used to be obsessed with tennis when I was like 17, 18, 19 years old in Canada.
My friend and I used to play every day in the summertime.
I took tennis lessons for a while.
I used to watch all the big tennis tournaments that happen around the world, like the US Open in Wimbledon and the French Open and things like that.
So yeah, and I don't think we've ever gotten a chance to really talk about tennis on Roundtable before.
So let's do it today.
Although, admittedly, it is a little bit of a different topic because we're not talking about people exercising as much as we're talking about the recycling of tennis balls.
Really good learning opportunity, I think, for all of us today because I, at least I, didn't know how bad they are for the environment.
Yeah, especially for people outside of the game itself who is perhaps new to the game or never had a chance to try before.
Like people like you and I, Yushun.
I thought tennis ball can be like last forever because it's just a ball.
With rubber, right?
It can bounce back.
And it's just usable when it can bounce back, though.
For me, I never thought that recycling tennis ball is a good idea.
I thought it's just out there and people throw it away after it loses bounces.
So what?
But here in China, something that happened recently, especially in the past two months, kind of shook our idea on just how big a difference it can make.
It can make a huge difference.
And we're going to start our story today in the beautiful city of Qingdao.
So what's the connection between Qingdao and tennis balls and recycling tennis balls?
You see, normally, especially for Chinese people, when you think of Qingdao, you just immediately think of the beautiful seaside because it's a very popular seaside area.
Well, yeah, and a good drink.
But tennis court, it's something less associated with the city.
But recently, just by their very beautiful beach and seaside view, there's a brand new tennis court built there and all coated in light blue color.
And citizens local citizens and tennis lovers are already playing tennis inside that court and what's really astonishing for us to learn is that this is china's first tennis court built using recycled tennis balls
So it's kind of developed by the sports brand Fila.
So over the course of two months, the brand collected over 20,000 discarded tennis balls from more than 40 tennis clubs across 16 Chinese cities just so that they have enough balls to be put together.
Put into a series of process of crushing the ball and remaking the ball so that these over 20,000 tennis balls are remade into a brand new tennis court.
Yeah, it's cool.
I've never heard of this type of thing before.
Yeah, me neither.
And actually, if you are standing on that kind of court, you wouldn't even notice that it is a court that made of tennis balls because the court still performs like a professional tennis court, yet beneath the surface is the material that would otherwise have ended up in landfill because that's what we're talking about.
They crush and shredded these discarded tennis balls and make it underneath this tennis court.
And it's a kind of striking example of how ways can be turned back into something very, very useful.
Yeah, there were media reports and some players were, some local players in Qingdao were talking about the experience of playing on the court that was made from recycled balls and they said, you can't really tell any difference at all.
Yeah, it bounces perfectly.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, so it's a nice thing that we're taking something that was bad for the environment and we are breaking it down and using it in its same place, which is kind of cool, tennis balls being used to make tennis courts, but why is this such an issue
Um all of a sudden because you know tennis has been around for a long time and i think we can safely say it's a growing sport
In china
It's becoming more and more popular
These days still kind of tough to find a court if you're looking to play but that being said still lots of people enjoy playing and it's great exercise
So, yeah.
Why now?
Why the issue with tennis balls?
I think we need to...
I think we need to start with the very fact that a tennis ball after discarded often previously end up in a landfill like in the garbage.
But for a normal tennis ball, it will take almost over 400 years for it to completely break down in the soil.
I think for one, that's already a big issue.
Imagine how many tennis balls out there that the world is discarding every day and all of that burdening our very ground.
330 million tennis balls every year.
330 million tennis balls every year around the world are simply thrown away.
So we are seeing this as a big challenge also because the balls themselves, the tennis balls, they are not meant to build for like easy decomposition or something.
It's meant for lasting because ever since it first became like popular game among the world back over in the 1920s,
It's already sort of in the shape like how it has been nowadays.
So over the past century, it hasn't really changed much.
Yeah, the balls that existed in the 1920s are basically the same thing that you get now.
Yeah, with a rubber core wrapped up by a blend of wool and nylon.
So it's like how we imagine it to be a neon green ball ever since over 100 years ago.
And yeah, they also use industrial strength glue to blend the felt.
The outside felt onto the ball which makes it all very hard to recycle from the start
Yeah yeah the way the ball that's the way it's put together it's just a real pain to take it apart to disassemble it because of the
You've got the felt on the outside you've got the rubber core and then you've got some industrial glue that's holding it together and it's just really difficult to do to recycle
Which means that it's supposed to be durable and they are durable.
But for a lot of these competitions and maybe some amateur players or professional players, they use them quite a lot.
Many recreational players open a fresh can every time they play.
That's what I saw.
Yeah i don't i don't know if that's entirely true that you'd use a new can of balls
Typically when you buy a can of tennis balls it looks like a cylinder right and then maybe i think there's three or four balls in one cylinder and you might use those for i don't know an entire summer if it's just you and i going out
To play tennis with each other.
So I wouldn't say they open up fresh balls every single time, but that being said, they do break down.
That yellow felt on the outside, it gets worn away.
Slowly but surely until eventually, I mean, it'll get worn down to the point where it's just the rubber ball on the inside, and when it gets worn down to a point, it just doesn't behave the same way on the court, and that's why players use a lot of them.
I know people change badminton very, very frequently.
The feathers break very easily.
I know, but for tennis balls, I didn't realize that during the 2022 Wimbledon Championships alone, more than 55,000 tennis balls were used over the course of two-week tournaments.
In two weeks?
Under the sports equipment regulations.
I guess the more professional you get, the harder you hit the ball and the faster it loses its bounce.
As long as you're using it, it's not that perfect anymore.
Then, of course, professional players want that ball to have the perfect and the best performance that they can get.
That's why they're replacing it very, very frequently.
Isn't that an astonishing number?
55,000 tennis balls over the course of a couple of weeks.
It's a fortnight, right?
Wimbledon, it's a two week tournament and they use that many balls.
Roland Garros, that's another one of the
That I used to watch when I was a teenager.
They used 60,000 over the course, that's the French Open.
They used 60,000 during the course of the tournament.
So yeah, we're talking about a tennis court in Qingdao, but that just illustrates that that all adds up.
You can imagine the number of tennis courts
In China,
You can imagine the number of tennis courts all around the world, and that's why we see 330 million thrown away on a yearly basis, and you already said it, it takes 400 years, four centuries
For these things to break down.
Now, because so many balls are used and because they take so long to recycle, it's now on the radar of the International Tennis Federation.
Yeah, since recent years, I believe, the International Tennis Federation has already established such a technical working group, and that was back in 2022, bringing together manufacturers of these balls and tournament organizers and recycling companies just so that they can explore how
The game can run in a more sustainable way.
Some companies even try to just start from the very beginning of the game, how they can make a ball that's completely out of recyclable materials.
But it turns out they did make out such a product, a tennis ball containing 30% of recycled materials.
But it turns out that it's well
If you're not the same it's not that good
If you're an amateur player you probably wouldn't feel much of a difference but if you're just using it for elite competition it doesn't meet the federation standard for for something like that
So
People have tried worldwide and that previous experiences accumulated just makes successful recycling projects so rare and also so valuable and significant as we see it nowadays.
Yeah, there are different projects around the world.
One of them in the United States is a nonprofit.
It's called Recycle Balls.
It's pretty straightforward with its title.
And they collect used tennis balls from different clubs and parks and universities and tournaments.
They do that across the United States.
They do it across Canada as well.
It's kind of a partnership there.
And that alone allows them to collect about three million balls every single year.
And instead of ending up in a landfill, which is what would happen for the longest time, do you know what they do with the...
Use tennis balls?
Or handicrafts?
That's what I can think of.
Well, one of them, Yushan, you'll love this.
They're used as dog toys.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, nice.
Dogs that I grew up with, we always had a tennis ball.
You play fetch with that, right?
We used...
Table tennis balls sometimes here in China, but well, yeah, that would be a good playmate for the doggies.
That and, and if you're watching and you're not familiar with this little hack, life hack at home, you can do this.
If you have an old tennis ball, you cut it in half.
Mm-hmm.
And then you put the bottom half, well they're both bottom halves I guess, you put it underneath the leg of a table or a chair.
So if you imagine you have a heavy table in your house and you try to pull it across the floor, then you're gonna make that squeaking sound or maybe even make a mark on the floor.
So if you put four half tennis balls underneath the legs of the table, then it's easier to slide across the floor.
It doesn't look that good.
You're not gonna win any design awards for that, I don't think.
But yeah, that's where a lot of those tennis balls go.
Yeah, and also previously, some other companies tried something similar as what Fila did in the Qingdao court too.
They managed to come up with the whole idea of just how to recycle old tennis balls and shred them and fill them up as new court.
Is doable, just like what we're describing these days, the Qingdao New Project.
Well, the Qingdao Project itself, just from collecting discarded tennis balls,
And then turning it into that finished cord.
They reduce carbon emissions by about 12 or so metric tons.
Now that number doesn't mean necessarily much, but that's about the same amount of carbon absorbed by four and a half hectares in a forest in a year.
That's a lot of, that's a big difference.
And it's a lot of land when you compare it like that.
So it's a worthwhile project, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
And it does make a significant difference.
But if we're talking about big breakthroughs, then maybe the court isn't the most...
Real one or the most significant one even though that on its own is impressive um it's that proving
It's proving that one of the biggest problems that existed within a sport in terms of um being bad for the environment has finally found a solution
Or i think it is also from another perspective it is reminding people that there are because
As a person who don't play tennis or probably just watch tennis from time to time, you wouldn't even notice or realize that tennis balls is an environmental issue for the whole world.
And now it is the time for people to at least understand and realize that there is an issue worldwide and we can actually have some solutions for it.
And the numbers that you just said is actually a kind of big change for probably in the future.
That's why I wanted to talk about this story today because, I mean, I even played tennis when I was younger, but I never think about tennis balls and I never think about their impact on the environment.
So this is cool.
I just want to cover this just quickly.
We said that it's bad, or sorry, we said that it's difficult to recycle the tennis balls.
What's the process actually like?
I guess step one is they break the ball apart.
Where does it go from there?
Well, yeah, actually, that step one is kind of the biggest challenge people used to encounter when trying to recycle tennis balls previously, because like we mentioned, how is tightly the outside fuzzy layer of
Nylon and wool mixture is tightly glued to the core.
Now what they do is to break the ball apart.
Now we're saving you guys all the technical terms here, but basically the collected old tennis balls are first crushed by machine, allowing the felt covering to be separated from the rubber core.
So that's step one.
And now that that's cracked, the following steps are more or less just categorize the two materials, the felt, the outside layer, and the rubber core, and kind of put them in different
To be honest, I've never seen what's inside a tennis ball.
Me neither.
Hollow.
What did you think?
Really?
Yeah.
You can kind of squeeze it, right?
You can't fully squeeze it.
It's hollow inside?
Yeah, it's empty inside.
Well, as far as I know, yeah.
Because when you cut open a tennis ball, like I said before, when you put them under the legs of your table, there's nothing in there.
It's just a hollow ball.
I guess that's why it bounces so well.
New knowledge though
Yeah but anyhow after they're put into two categories the core and the the felt they don't simply just um throw away one part but instead it's processed into recycled textile materials and that by that i'm mentioning the the the outside felt
Meanwhile, the rubber undergoes further purification and processing before being transformed into recycled EPDM rubber granules.
Now, you might not need to know what EPDM is, but it's just a highly durable
Synthetic rubber that's widely used because it's flexible and that it's UV light kind of resistant and that it can also resistant like wet condition like a rainy day and stuff like that.
So it's all kind of plan ahead before this whole separation is done.
It's cool that the players don't notice any difference either, right?
Because a tennis court, I don't know how to describe it.
It's not like you're stepping on pavement, but it's kind of like you're stepping on pavement.
Depending on the type of court.
If you're playing on, there's different types of courts too, right?
There's a hard court, which I think is what we're talking about in Qingdao, where that feels like pavement a little bit, but it's also just like 1% cushy, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
Then you've got grass courts and clay courts and things like that too.
They need very sophisticated design on these courts, just like a football field.
Because it feels very, very differently.
When you're wearing different types of shoes on different types of grass.
That's why it is quite actually very important for a professional athlete to actually step on these kind of fields.
Yeah, so the different types of courts, like apparently the balls that are designed for clay courts are different than the balls that are designed for grass courts are different from the balls that are designed for hard courts.
But this is all at a pro level and I don't really know.
I mean, for me, when I was playing in Canada, you just go to the sports store and buy a can of balls and they're all kind of the same.
And for the Qingdao case, the cord is kind of built from the recycled rubber granules that's kind of cushioning layer, as you described earlier.
At the very last step, the workers will apply a fast-drying, low, volatile organic compound, kind of like a tint on the outer layer, and it's also environmentally friendly.
Well, is the whole process environmentally friendly?
It's meant to be, yeah.
But the the the chemicals that are
You said there are a lot of chemicals involved in the making of a tennis ball
So what happens when you break those down is everything okay there
I think that could be one of the you know hard parts of recycling these kind of tennis balls because at the moment it is relatively a young industry of recycling the whole
Tennis balls and everything.
And at the moment, there are very few studies looking specifically at it's like long term environmental and also healthy health impacts, because when you're shredding these kind of tennis balls, there's got to be these rubber particles that is spreading away.
Right.
And then when
I was just about to say, the micro versions of those could find their way into people's lungs.
Well, let's talk about the challenges a little bit since we've kind of opened that door.
I'm guessing that one of them has to be about the collection because
You know, this example in Qingdao is an example of one tennis court, one tennis club, and then you've got, you said, 16 different Chinese cities, right?
But still, if you think
On a bigger scale, maybe nationwide, even only using China as an example,
Collecting all of these tennis balls would be a really difficult thing because of course you've got pro players, but this is a sport mostly played by amateur people who are doing it as a hobby.
And you don't know they you you take your tennis balls home with you when you're finished playing right
So where do they end up
How do you how do you track these things
Because i think a lot of people because they don't know that they're damaging the environment when they throw them away
That's exactly what they do.
They just throw it out with their trash.
It's not like batteries.
Because on every trash can, there's got a little slot for you to put batteries in, the wasted batteries.
But there are no like place for people to throw their own like discarded tennis balls.
And for amateur players, they will just throw it in a garbage can and then throw it with other garbage.
Even if you live in a place where your recyclables are very well organized, right?
Like your plastics go here, your papers go here.
What?
What do you do with a tennis ball?
Well, that's why outside of the, for example, the courts gate in a lot of the tennis clubs and the venues that offers places for you to play tennis,
Where people actually go to these specific places to for playing tennis
Outside of these places there are buckets set for collections and it's done not only in china but also by that very organization you mentioned earlier
Recycle balls that's what they do
They encourage children after practicing throw balls into the very much designated bins that has a little label on
Saying that, yeah, it's for recycle.
And so, yeah, that's where it goes.
That's a good way for just common tennis players to try to recycle things.
But I think more importantly for tournaments, for those opens that we mentioned, these events,
They play a bigger role in calling onto people's attention on why it's important that we recycle it and how as an event we can gather around and have the balls used during the tournament to be recycled.
What will be an example of that?
Well, here in China, we also have China Open.
And in 2024, the China Open organizers partnered with one of the universities here in Beijing, actually, the Beijing University of Technology, to introduce their latest innovation on an AI-powered machine.
It looks like a wardrobe where you can toss the balls inside.
And inside that machine with AI powered analysis and facilitation process, they can tell the worn out level of the ball you throw in.
If it's still in good condition, it's... Spits it back out?
Yeah, it's going to be put in, not spit it back out, but it's going to put in one category.
And if it's too worn, it's going to end up in another category.
So what they did in 2024 was that
By this machine, they collected nearly 2,000 used tennis balls, and those that end up in the first bin, those that's not too much worn, still usable, they were donated to Fuping County in Hebei Province nearby, near Beijing, to support their local grassroots
Tennis development, like for the kids, for public schools.
And then those are too worn, too damaged in a way that they cannot be used anymore.
They were just donated to the labs for further scientific research on how to break them down.
So, yeah.
And also technology alone isn't enough because public participation will be just also as important.
Of course, you were saying that there are several methods and maybe
Um intelligent ways of collecting these kind of boss but the thing is that if people are not participating in these kind of events it's still very hard for you to you know actually collect these balls
And at the 2025 china open organizers launched a give tennis boss a second life campaign
Inviting fans to donate their used tennis balls while learning more about recycling process through interactive exhibits and also games, maybe test your accuracy when you're throwing to the machine.
And also to encourage participation, anyone donating three used balls could choose rewards including discounted tennis lessons, AI training vouchers, or food and beverage discounts.
And that is a simple but creative way of making recycling part of the overall tennis experience.
Yeah, I think it's smart too to use platforms like the 2025 China Open, one of the biggest, if not the biggest tennis event in the country,
Use that platform to educate people, get them involved, let them know,
That these balls need to be recycled, that they're not great for the environment, get the kids involved.
Yeah, it's a great thing.
But it's not just about tennis.
If we look at the wider sports industry, the idea of recycling sporting equipment is starting to gain more and more traction.
And it also is kind of timely for us to talk about this because coming up soon, we have National Ecological Day here in China.
So these two, there's a bit of overlap between our sports story and the day coming up.
Yes, every year, I think starting from 2023, we have the National Ecological Day here in China landing on August the 15th.
So it's a time for us to really raise public awareness by hosting the main event at one place and just share what we've done lately, what are the recent
Current policies pointing at in terms of recycling in terms of ecological protection and conservation and also where we're heading next time in the next few years
So in many ways the stories today like you mentioned Steve kind of echoes with the vibe of this national ecological day too because
Going green nowadays is no longer just about protecting the environment like how we mentioned it back in a decade ago.
Now it's more about, yes, we need to go green and this is happening in all different industries.
The forestry protection, how brands are making products more green so that it also echoes with it.
And you see, this is a whole economic opportunity for these brands to come up with something greener and more sustainable, because at the end of the day, it shouldn't be the consumers
To always stay alerted, to always realize what's recyclable and what's not, and always have the awareness from their end on what they can do or what we can do to protect the environment.
It's up to the upper stream, the industries, the manufacturers, to make decisions like that, too.
Yeah, and customers like that.
Yeah.
You know, when companies show a certain sense of responsibility for the environment, that tends to go over very well with customers.
It feels like a lot of these waste recycling industry can be a really, really big industry and we are just not yet discovered a lot of them because we also had a discussion on
The industry of recycling smartphones.
That is also such a very big industry.
And complicated.
Yeah, of course, because there are so many very important, like...
Iron gold silver inside a smartphone and they're as we all say One person's trash could be another person's treasure so it can
A lot of them can be turned into a very very big industry and Make a lot of money out of it.
So it is very economic related when we are actually talking about recycling
Whole bunch of probably millions of trillions of tennis balls.
Yeah.
Earlier this year, too.
I mean, we have National Ecological Day coming up very soon, but also earlier this year,
Uh the top legislature
Here in china
They passed the country's first ecological and environmental code and that officially comes into effect
There's a lot of overlap in this story today because that officially comes into effect on that day as well
Yeah, on the very day that we mentioned, August the 15th.
And speaking of the code, the code also encourages the wider use of recycled materials.
It calls for the establishment of national standards
And certification system, and provides tax incentives and other policy support for companies that manufacture products using recycled resources.
So you see, it's not only just that we're requiring the industry to go greener.
Actually beneficial for brands to come up with greener ideas and like economically beneficial ideas that follow suit.
That's also a lot of the concepts and idea of a lot of these companies.
Actually, I don't remember the exact stats, but I think there are stats showing that when companies are launching or releasing like environmental friendly products, like I think it is a like laptop brand.
They designed their packaging box as a reusable box that you can use it as a laptop stand.
Yeah, I've seen that before.
And then that attracted a lot of people.
So when companies are using these kind of ideas, they actually attract more consumers to buy that.
And I think that's also the idea of the consumers.
They will prefer these kind of products and more and more people will realize the importance of protecting and maybe also recycling a lot of these resources.
Well, it's not just the products.
I mean, that's wonderful.
The tennis court we talked about, but it's also venues as well.
There's a baseball field called the Strike for Zero Baseball Field.
What is the name of the location where it is?
Dongguan is where that baseball field is?
Yeah, Dongguan in southern China's Guangdong province.
It's a really smart name, Strike for Zero.
Yeah, that baseball field was built using 90% recyclable, environmentally friendly materials.
The fencing, you know, at the back of a baseball field, you have the fence there.
Well, that fencing contains nearly 100, sorry, 10,000 recycled plastic bottles on the fence.
It's pretty cool.
That's how they made it.
I haven't seen pictures of it.
The bases are cool too.
The base is like first base, second base, third base on a baseball diamond.
They used 150 recycled tires
To help build those bases.
I see the vibe.
Yeah.
And even the layer beneath the field, kind of the shock absorption layer beneath the field, they use 450 recycled shoe soles for that.
Sounds like a very Mad Max style court.
Yeah.
But anyway, it is environmental friendly court.
Yeah, exactly, so it's cool.
We're seeing the court in Qingdao being remade and the players are happy with it, which, by the way, I think is a really important point.
Because if they made this court out of recycled tennis balls and the players said no i don't like this it affects how the ball bounces or it affects how i feel on the court even at an amateur level
I think people would complain about that, but they're not.
And because they're not, it means they can do it again.
And again, they can repeat this process.
And now because it's happening, you know, with 16 cities involved already, I'm not sure what the expansion plans are, but I'm sure they must be there with all these different clubs.
This seems like something that could become a bigger, perhaps, I don't know if industry is the right word to use, but done on a bigger scale all around China.
And if we have success with it here,
Along with the programs in America and Canada as well, then we might not look at tennis balls as the problem that they are for our environment.
I was shocked by that statistic.
400 years underground is how long they stay.
You have joined us on today's Roundtable.
I'm Steve Hatherly with Yushan and Yushan, stay with us.
We're going to talk more when we come back.
You're with us on Roundtable.
I'm Steve Hatherly today with Yushan and Yushun.
Coming up, there's a viral complaint going around China right now.
Professors and employers losing their minds over students who don't know how to write a proper email.
No subject lines, no sign-offs, just straight-up chaos.
But here's the thing.
These kids grew up on apps.
Email was never their world.
So who is really out of touch here?
Is it them or is it the rest of us?
Don't forget, you can find us at Roundtable China on Apple Podcast.
And don't forget, too, that we love to hear from you.
So you can send us an email.
With anything that you would like to share with us.
You can send us a voice note, too.
That would be great.
Roundtablepodcast at qq.com.
One more time.
Roundtablepodcast at qq.com.
Okay, so emails...
Tell me what was the last email you sent?
Well, only tell me if you can tell, tell me, but what was, I want to get an idea of how often we use emails, uh, personally, when was the last time you sent an email and to who, what was it about?
You see, the last time I sent an email was to contact an interview for Yushun.
Oh, okay.
That was a long time ago, though.
That was a few months ago, not that long.
But yeah, that's something that we use.
Especially when we're trying to contact potential interviewees
That works in a school, that we know that there are professors or teachers and lecturers who will constantly check their email more often than, I don't know, perhaps business leaders.
So yeah, in that scenario, a well-written email, I remember I really
Fine tune my whole language when I was trying to draft it.
And then I, of course, copy and paste it onto ChatGPT to have it polished.
To add a bit of that formality to it and also to shorten it.
And then send it to, yeah, professor, we really would like to have this chance to invite you to our show and share a little bit.
I saw you CC'd me, and that was a very well-written email, and I...
I didn't expect that, okay, Yushan is so good at writing emails, the language and then everything.
It was perfect.
We're going to find out a little later that she used to be a teacher of email writing.
What about for you, Yushan?
I couldn't even, because last time it was me writing an email to another colleague from another department because that's what we need to do when we're contacting another colleague from another department.
And I kind of have an anxiety of writing emails and receiving emails because... Really?
Whenever i received email means that this another department asked me to do another edits on the video that i just posted so you assume it's bad news
Yeah so i don't like writing emails and also do all of these um you know quote unquote email etiquettes question when you see an email in the inbox
Do you open it immediately or because it gives you anxiety, do you kind of ignore it for a little while?
It's linked with my WeChat so I can always see who sent it and what's the subject of it.
Unlink it, unlink it.
There's no escape.
All right.
Well, let's get into the topic.
This is an interesting one too.
They found that many college students don't understand email etiquette.
And this is a topic that's gone viral online.
Yeah, this is a very popular hashtag actually on the social media platform Weibo.
And it is called found that many college students don't understand email etiquette.
And this hashtag has received more than 23 million views and also more than 7000 discussions at around 28000 comments.
That's so surprising to me that that's become such a hot topic on Chinese social media, how to write an email properly.
They were just claiming or complaining that these students,
They have to search for a template online just to write a formal email, first of all.
And others simply just write emails the way that they send a WeChat or QQ message.
I've seen those before, yeah.
And yeah, a lot of people are...
Saying and expressing that kind of genuine concern.
They're concerning that college students, they don't know how to write emails.
So what are people saying?
You said there's what, almost 30,000 comments online
What are people talking about?
Some of them are really funny.
One person wrote, I've recently received quite a few internship applications from college students.
The biggest problem isn't that their resumes lack experience.
It's just many of them simply don't know how to write a proper email.
And some people put nothing in the subject line except resume.
Okay, so this is a complaint from a professor.
No, from an HR that received resumes from internship students.
And some leave the entire body blank and just attach the file in the email.
And then there are files named things like final version to reallyfinal.pdf.
Oh, no, that was their own personal name.
They just don't rename the file, which means that the HR, when they download it, they don't even know who that resume belongs to.
No, but I have sympathy for that person, though, because that's how I label some of our roundtable stories.
When I finish writing it, I'll say like final, and then I'm thinking, oh no, I wanna add a different part to the story.
So then I add it and then I say really final or final, final, and then I'll put it into our group chat.
So I do have a bit of sympathy for that person.
Sorry to interrupt.
So HR people are annoyed.
Professors are annoyed.
And it's an issue that is frustrating both groups
But some college students, they're also, you know, pushing back against these kind of critics.
I was just about to say, but not everybody's criticizing because some people are saying this criticism is not really fair.
Yeah, I have to say this one because one commenter joked that, now I guess I should learn how to write on bamboo sleeves next.
Wait, what does a bamboo sleeve have anything to do with?
Bamboo slips is like ancient form of writing letters.
In ancient China, yes.
It's how they used to write.
You could carve it.
It's like saying emails are archaic.
Everybody's using WeChat now anyway.
Why do we need to care about emails?
When we were having a chat about whether we were gonna do this topic or not on the show, one of the interesting things that I learned is that email culture is a little bit different in China than it might be in the West.
I cannot say that China like literally skipped the time of the you know the the population or the popularity of email but
There are very different scenarios when email is in China.
So back in the 1990s, when internet access spread through China, email became very important in universities and also in business, in companies.
One example is Sina Mail, launched in 1998.
So it brought to a wider public when email was quite popular.
There was also a time when Chinese people don't use a lot of cell phones.
That's how we define cell phones today.
So sending email remains to be a major way of correspondence, especially between higher education students.
Scenarios.
And then we go to the time around 1999 to 2000.
That's the time when that social media platform or the instant message platform QQ was launched.
For an entire generation of young Chinese internet users, QQ became a far more natural way to talk to people.
You can send the message, receive the message very, very instantly.
You don't need to wait for any second.
So QQ was like the old school WeChat?
Yes, exactly.
And it's actually still popular among maybe a certain group of people.
Among my generation.
Not any younger.
And then to the 2000s, email state important universities and workplaces.
But QQ and WeChat and the forums became the natural tools for everyday communication.
And, you know, an entire generation learn to communicate digitally without ever building a strong habit of, you know, formal email writing.
So it is not that it is not that fair to university students.
And for them, it's just they they've never used an email for their time of using the Internet.
I think the the the.
The structure of how you send an email versus how you send a WeChat message is very different, obviously, right?
You're sending a text message versus sending a formal email.
But these college students would have been born in a time, at a time,
When everything was done, we talk about 1999, QQ became popular, 2011, WeChat became popular.
Well, today's college students would have grown up with instant messaging.
So my point is, is that if you've grown up with instant messaging and you've always done your communicating with your friends through instant messaging and you've never used an email for anything, well then, how would you know
How to write an email.
You wouldn't, you would have no idea.
That's why a lot of commenters also saying that it should be a public course or a mandatory course for college students to learn how to write.
But still a lot of college students saying, why is that even necessary if we have all of the instant messages?
See, for young people, and I'm speaking that's outside of just the context here within China,
When I was younger, I remember like sending emails from my side to the U.S. side when I was chatting with my American friends.
And back then, instant messaging wasn't really a thing.
And of course, I didn't have access to WhatsApp or Facebook.
So emailing was the only way of correspondence.
And it felt.
Not too much different from just texting via WeChat.
It's kind of the idea of who you're sending this message to.
If it's just a friend,
Appear that end up in a different country who grew up using email and that whole system and the writing habit, then it ends up just like texting.
And there's no formality to it.
There's no format or the specific need.
It's not the complaint from the professors and from HR.
That's a different scenario.
Yeah, let's go back to their side of the argument now, because they're not saying young students or young potential employees don't know how to open a computer and click send after they write.
They're not saying that.
They're saying it's...
The content in it, it's things like the, what do you call that?
You can tell how often I send emails too.
The thing where the title.
Subject line.
Yeah, thank you.
The subject line.
They're complaining about that.
They're complaining about the structure of the email.
So it's a little bit of a different thing.
I guess where I was trying to land is for a lot of Chinese kids, we mistook email as another way of texting.
And they didn't grow up with the idea that email should look like in a certain way.
Yeah, that's fair.
The kind of they carry this whole mentality to workplace too as a show by i media research which is a widely cited chinese market research firm that instant messaging tools are already the third most used category of office softwares here in china
It's used by over 40 percent of collaborative office users
Behind only document platforms and video conferencing
So you see how massive it has been or how common as it has been for chinese young workplace professionals to use instant messaging
So that's where we are kind of inclined to to think about when when we think about messaging
And also another research by Quest Mobile, and this is the data from 2025,
Their data show that three chat-based enterprise platforms, DingTok, and Wecome, and Feishu, they now cover a combined 92% of China's collaborative office software market.
Question, what are those?
Like office apps that you use for communicating with your colleagues.
Within the office.
They have special designs for work-related processes.
You can issue and contract on these platforms.
You can talk to another department member.
So, and these things are really, really popular among nowadays, like, especially in Chinese internet companies or new media companies.
People just don't use email to, like, communicate with each other.
What was that?
Sorry, I want to come, I asked because I want to come back to it.
What was that percentage?
92%?
92.
92%.
I want to come back to that.
Mm-hmm.
Here's a question.
Is email dying?
I remember this was kind of an issue, not an issue, it was a topic within the tech industry.
Many years ago, predictions were made by this year, email will be dead, nobody will be using it anymore because of things, I guess, like instant messaging.
Is it a dying thing?
Is it looking to disappear?
It is kind of the opposite because over the past, say, 10 to 15 years, do you think global email use has gone up or down?
I think the number probably is going up.
A ready caddy group.
It is a technology market research firm that tracked email use since 1990s.
Global email volume climbed from about 361 billion messages a day in 2024 to roughly 376 billion in 2025.
So it is actually climbing up.
That doesn't surprise you, Yushan?
Not really.
Previously, before I become part of Roundtable, I used to work in a publishing institute.
And there, we sent out hundreds of emails every day.
Sometimes it's just by bot.
To invite someone to participate in joining us as an editor.
Sometimes it's something you type out as an invitation.
So for certain job industries, for certain professional fields,
Like when it comes to academic research or correspondence between a student and their professors, the email is something they use day by day.
And I wouldn't be surprised if it's not dropping.
But I was indeed a little bit surprised by the fact that it's actually rising.
Yeah, I thought the number would have been going down, actually.
And that's what experts predicted a long time ago, is that it would disappear, but it just hasn't, and it continues to grow.
Okay, so you said, Yuxin, that you get anxiety when you see your inbox, ding, one new email.
How do you think Gen Z American workers feel about using email in the workplace?
I've got some stats here.
Do you think that they prefer instant messaging or do you think that they prefer email?
You said you get anxiety from email.
So my answer would be it must be instant message.
That's what they prefer.
I would think email because email has always been the workplace prioritized correspondence way in the West, right?
Yushan, you are correct, but your logic is incorrect, though.
This is really kind of interesting.
So there was a survey from last year in 2025, and they found that 42% of Gen Z workers named email their favorite tool for professional communication.
What?
Yep.
That's more than 20%, double the 20% who picked chat apps like Slack.
Slack's like what you described before, like an office instant messaging application, or WhatsApp was an option there too.
Here's another one.
This is cool.
The reason why.
So the same survey found that 60% of Gen Z respondents said they specifically use email so that they can avoid awkward real-time conversations at work.
Wow.
There was a clinical psychologist who talked about it in her research.
Her name is Dr. Katherine Wickholm.
And what she said was, the reason we see those high numbers in terms of preference for using emails is because it creates a barrier of sorts
For the person on the receiving end.
So what that means is, if you get, so let's say we're sitting around the office, right, and we're all doing our work, and ding, you get a instant message.
Well, when you get the instant message on your phone, young Gen Z in America feel like, oh, I have to respond to this immediately, I have to do that right now.
Because that's how you communicate with your friends, right?
But with email, that pressure doesn't really exist.
There's an implication of the fact that you can delay a little bit.
Which is why I asked you before, do you feel the need to reply to it immediately?
Or do you even check it?
Because I'm guessing, I don't have a stat on that, how often they check it.
But because there's that degree of separation, that's why young Gen Z prefer that style of communication at the office.
And also, you don't know whether this person has already read the email.
They can just say, oh, I didn't check the email inbox.
But with instant messaging, you know immediately because that annoying checkmark is there, right?
That's a good excuse.
That is a good way to have like, quote unquote, like work-life balance.
You can always...
Um separate your work life as the the world of email and then your instant message is your own personal life yeah
I want to come back to China now and talk about this, because if you said, oh, this is the statistic I wanted to return to.
92% of employees done in that study or survey use instant messaging in the office, but yet
HR is complaining that young people don't know how to use or don't know how to send a proper email.
Professors are complaining that young students don't know how to send a proper email.
And now we'll come back to the 92% again.
Nobody's really using email in a Chinese office anyway.
Well, then what's the big deal?
Why is everybody annoyed if 92% of people aren't using emails anyway?
Yeah, that's a legit question that you can ask when you are in this kind of situation.
And that's why a lot of college students are saying
As long as I send this email and I send this file to you, then it is a good email.
Why do you care about all of these?
Okay, message is delivered.
Shut up.
Yeah.
As long as I send.
But the thing is that they do, like HRs and professors, they do still care about the manners.
I think one thing is about there is a kind of a ritual of sending and writing emails.
It is giving you a sense of...
Formal um situation right and also email still does like things like that chat apps genuinely just aren't built for
One thing is that it clear it creates a clear and also searchable record um of course
Chat apps can do that, but it's quite different by saying that the record that is being recorded.
Also, it's essential for applying to jobs, submitting formal documents, communicating with a university or working internationally.
So internationally would be like before.
Not everybody uses the same instant messaging apps.
Right.
So that's a good point.
And what how you write an email and the manner that you're having in this kind of emails generally creates a kind of impression.
When you're not having a good etiquette when you're writing these emails.
And it's not only about the language, it's also about the etiquette, the format, the structure of all of these emails.
And I think the reason why so many professors and HRs, they're feeling disappointed nowadays by the very fact that young people don't perhaps know exactly how to draft an email is because when it's an email,
Instead of an instant message, the expectation is different.
For an email, there's always a higher expectation for the formality, for how much attention and priority you're putting into your writing, and they don't see that.
Among the emails sent by today's young people anymore.
So there's this misunderstanding or stereotypical view of, wow, young people don't know how to write.
But really, at the essence of this issue, I feel like
Whether you are going to do like global trade or write to a professor or not, writing an email is deemed, since day one perhaps, a skill that you need to know whether or not you're going to use it or not.
Or how often you're going to use it.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
I think it comes down to, and this is why I think HR is upset with young people and why professors are upset.
I think there's two things.
One is attention to detail, like you mentioned.
If you don't know, find out.
Right.
Right.
It's not like it's hard.
Well, yeah.
It's called the Internet.
Go on there.
And people are, 28,000 comments, people asking about this.
That's one of the issues.
And I think the other one is professionalism.
Yeah.
Even if you're talking to your professor, you want to show a certain level of respect, of course.
You want to stand out from your classmates, and you want to make, like you said, you shouldn't make a good impression.
And when you send, what were some of the subject lines before?
Resume.
Resume.
I mean, to be fair, that's what it is.
It's not like it's mislabeled.
It doesn't say grocery list.
So I think those are two of the biggest things.
And to be honest, I think it's a fair criticism.
I'm not blaming young people for not knowing how because growing up not knowing how to use something
It's only natural.
If you've never been taught how to use it, well, then it's not your fault that you don't know how to use it.
But I don't think it's that hard to find out how to write a proper business email or a polite, respectful email, the proper structure.
Online if you search.
But I shouldn't be the one giving advice about that because we have an actual email teacher, former email teacher, in our midst.
I mean, previously I was pulled up to that position because they realized that the respondents from my email recipient shows to be higher comparing with other editors.
So I was kind of carrying the role so that all of the editors know
That the content is sent out and it's not the end of that business because writing email is a little bit more than just simply texting and delivering a message.
And I guess that's what the HRs and the professors are trying to tell
Nowadays young people too, that is it takes a little bit more to write an email because when writing an email, you kind of need to always hold the mentality that you need to think of your writing from the recipient's side.
It's not just you writing.
You need to picture what your writing looks like if you're the recipient.
Is the message clear enough?
If you're inviting someone like we used to as editors.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Is the message... Write this down.
Not really.
This is no...
Class for anybody
But really I guess the real controversy in connection with today's topic is yeah we need to pay a little bit of effort on the email writing especially when it comes to yeah you're submitting something
And the reason why like your former company was calling you to do so is I think because you need to write emails to these professors and you need to have a better image for this whole company when you are writing.
I used to tease my previous colleagues that this is a perfect job for people pleasers like me.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
In order to write a good email, you have to be a people pleaser.
I'm just joking aside.
But the thing is, yeah, writing an email does take a bit more effort.
I think, like you said, it's not really that hard to learn and that, yeah, it's something that's going to be beneficial for not only you but also for the recipient when they see it.
Someday it will.
Someday, yeah.
But it's not like you have to follow these kind of 19th century letter way of writing emails.
You can- Dearest sir or madam.
I hope this letter finds you well.
I don't know why my old man British voice came out there.
Anyway, so yeah, sometimes like, hi, Professor Jung is exactly right.
That is the correct way to write it.
And maybe the real skill isn't just memorizing
Every old rule, it's about knowing which rules actually matter in which kind of situation.
Yeah, which context.
Right.
Yeah.
Have you ever learned about this in school?
I actually did because I studied business English.
So there is a specific course called Business English Correspondence.
And then they teach you, I mean, my teacher teach us how to write a like kind of business scenario email.
See, the real expert is right there.
I'm only amateur.
Oh, yeah.
Talking about professionalism, they have a kind of 4C business correspondence writing tool.
Wow.
4C means conciseness, clarity.
Oh, geez.
Hold on.
Conciseness.
Clarity, correctness, and courtesy.
So express as much information as possible with as few words as possible.
Avoiding unnecessary repetition, expressing your meaning clearly, proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, professional terminology.
And also using polite tone, appropriate forms of address, conventional phrases and proper openings and closings.
There are quite some rules for you to actually follow when you're writing in a formal way.
It's not a joke.
I remember, yeah, I was an economics major for two years, so I had to take business classes.
And I remember, I don't think it was a separate class, but it was definitely one of the lessons in one of the classes about writing a bad news email.
Oh.
A bad news too.
No, that's tough.
Yeah, a bad news email.
So the way that you do it, I don't know why this stood out in my memory all these years, but I still remember what the lesson said.
When you deliver a bad news email, first you, it's like making a sandwich.
So you want to go... Do you remember?
I know that sandwich way of rejecting people.
First of all, saying that something nice and then show what you actually want to say and then use another way of saying something nice.
Yeah.
So what that means is positive, you're bad news, positive.
So it's like a bad news sandwich.
Bad news patty.
With two positive pieces of bread.
That's actually a very professional technique that you can use.
Because I saw that on social media.
Because a lot of people are saying that I don't know how to reject
Someone and then people say you just you should use these sandwich technique like when you break up with somebody right
You say like look well you say look you're a really great person but don't break up with an email it's not me it's
It's not you it's me so you start with something great and then you say but you're single now
But I had a really great time during our relationship.
Bye.
That's kind of the same thing, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Let me use that strategy to wrap up our show for today.
Okay.
We're going to do the bad news email style, okay?
Yeah.
Roundtable viewers, we thank you so much for joining our program today, but not only today, every single day that you are with us on the show.
However, we regret to inform you that today's show has run out of time.
But don't worry, we'll be back again with another episode of Roundtable next time.
Sincerely, Steve.
See?
Easy breezy.
Perfect way.
For Yushan and Yushan.
Best wishes.
I am Steve Hatherly.
And yes, sincerely, thanks for being with us on Roundtable today.
And we'll see you next time.
Bye-bye.
