An American GM of a contract manufacturing company recently told me one of his staff was highly stressed. They argued about something relatively minor, an hour after which the staff member texted the GM and apologized. “I’m just worried about 2012,” she said.

“Huh?” I said.

“Yep,” he said. “2012.”

Apparently, Chinese blogs and forums are abuzz with apocalyptic conjecture about the devastation wrought on Chinese society come a new era ushered in by a blockbuster Hollywood film of the same name. The film did phenomenonally well in China, surpassed in box office receipts only by Avatar, another other-worldly movie based on the precept of the destruction humans have wrought their own world – with the cosmos rebalancing the equation.

Nevertheless, the collective stresses and strains of a society in fast forward, transforming every aspect of its way of life and its relationship with the rest of the world is clearly beginning to surface in the collective consciousness of the entire society. As one Chinese friend said to me with the recent earthquake in the Qinghai Autonomous Region in northwest China, “I feel nothing. China is having so many problems. I have become numb.”

Nevertheless, with natural disasters aplenty – always a part of Chinese history – and man-made ones as well, what seems to be cutting through the average Chinese’s numbness are the senseless suicides and the mass murders of children. Something, the Chinese bulletin boards all agree, is not right.

It’s too late, though, to get off this speeding bullet train.