"The comics of 'Hunzi Says' use no tongue-twisting, hard-to-recognize words and no showy literary flourishes; the points they focus on are exactly what the public wants to know, as if someone were holding up a comic and telling you a story."
—Southern People Weekly

"If you follow Brother Hunzi's public account, those comics—plain yet deep, packed with memes—are unforgettable at a glance. That comics can draw people in is rare enough; using comics like these to explain a concept clearly is genuinely surprising."
—Fan Deng Reading Club

"It explains, in the simplest way, eleven chapters' worth of content: the origin of money, the five insurances and one fund, pensions, which taxes you pay, borrowing, consumer psychology, pyramid schemes, and more."
—Douban reader

★ A major economics primer under the super brand “Half‑Hour Comics,” backed by a hit IP with 7 million followers. This is the latest popular‑science work by Chen Lei (pen name: Er Hunzi), creator of comic‑style education, following the bestselling Half‑Hour Comics: Chinese History and Tang Poetry. The series has become the #1 knowledge‑comic brand in China, consistently topping sales charts.

★ Hilarious comics demystify everyday economics and cure all confusion. Why are pension funds running short? Why did China relax its two‑child policy? What's the use of the “five social insurances and one housing fund”? What should you know before buying a house? No boring numbers or jargon—just funny sketches and punchlines that make sense of these common puzzles and reveal the economic principles behind them.

★ Critically acclaimed and commercially successful, with over 10,000 positive reviews. Douban rating 6.9 from 12,000+ raters. Readers praise it as “the simplest way to understand the origin of money, social security, pensions, taxes, loans, consumer psychology, pyramid schemes, and more.”

The set comprises four volumes:
Vol.1 Everyday Life Basics
Vol.2 Financial Crises
Vol.3 Financial Crises (Finale)
Vol.4 Personal Finance

To everyone who wants to understand the economic logic behind daily life. Hilarious comics make plain the economics of pensions, taxes, housing, and crises—pack economic common sense into your head between fits of laughter.

To everyone who wants to understand the economic logic behind daily life.
Why is the pension fund running in the red? Why did the state relax its two-child policy? What good are the "five insurances and one fund" we pay? What must you know before buying a home? How do you avoid the pitfalls when borrowing?—these everyday questions, tied to everyone's life, all hide economic principles beneath. Half-Hour Comics Economics: Everyday Basics uses laugh-out-loud hand-drawn comics to make daunting economics as easy as reading a joke.
To most readers, economics means something professional and abstruse. But the Half-Hour Comics team led by Chen Lei uses hand-drawn comics and jokes to weave economics together with the practical questions of real life, explaining it in plain language. The book is divided into eleven chapters: opening with "Why We Should Study Economics," then the origin of money, the "five insurances and one fund," pensions, medical insurance, taxes, home-buying, population and the economy, borrowing, consumer psychology, and finally a takedown of pyramid schemes. It touches on classic economic concepts such as Adam Smith's "invisible hand," Tversky and Kahneman's "loss aversion," the Ponzi scheme, Tversky's "price anchoring," and Richard Thaler's "mental accounting."
This is not a textbook that makes you sit up straight, but a book that lets you pack economic common sense into your head between fits of laughter. Open it and see how the author turns daunting economic principles into punchlines.

Chen Lei (pen names: Erhunzi / Hunzi Ge)
A pioneer of comic-style popular science, Chairman of Shanghai Hunzhi Culture Communication Co., Ltd., holder of a master's degree from Northwestern Polytechnical University, and a senior science-communication researcher.

After earning his master's from Northwestern Polytechnical University in 2009, he joined Shanghai Volkswagen as a designer and began publishing original popular-science comics online in 2012. In 2014, with 1.47 million yuan in angel investment from CCTV host Zhang Quanling and an additional 15 million yuan from Xu Xiaoping, he founded a comics studio. In 2015 he launched the "Hunzhi" WeChat account; by 2025 its cross-platform following reached 64 million, with total reads surpassing 500 million. In 2017 his Comic Chinese History sold out within seven hours of release, driving history books to the top of national sales for three consecutive years. In 2021 he won the Best Comics Publishing Award at the China Animation Golden Dragon Awards. In 2022 he was appointed Online Integrity Ambassador. In 2023 he opened the Hunzhi cultural complex at Shanghai Tower. In 2024 he was named one of the Top Ten Innovative Figures among Shanghai Cultural Enterprises (5th edition) and received the 16th Shanghai Outstanding Public Science Communicator title. He serves as a member of the All-China Youth Federation, a member of the Shanghai Youth Federation, and vice president of the Shanghai Youth Literature and Art Federation, among other public roles.

His representative works include the Half-Hour Comics Chinese History series (cumulative sales exceeding 30 million copies), the Half-Hour Comics World History series, the Half-Hour Comics Science History series (winner of the 2022 Shanghai Excellent Popular Science Book award), Half-Hour Comics: The Big Bang (selected among the 2022 National Excellent Popular Science Works), and Comic Centenary of the Party: The Founding.

1. Opening: Why We Should Study Economics
2. The Origin of Money: Where Does It Come From
3. Just What Is the "Five Insurances and One Fund" We've Been Paying
4. Can Pensions Actually Support Old Age
5. Just What Does Medical Insurance Cover
6. Grasp in One Breath Exactly Which Taxes You Pay
7. A Few Things You Must Know Before Buying a Home
8. Population and the Economy: Having Kids Turns Out to Be an Economic Issue
9. Borrowing Matters: How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Lending
10. Consumer Psychology: A Guide for Shoppers to Avoid Overspending
11. A Takedown of Pyramid Schemes: Cherish Life, Stay Away from Pyramid Selling