Prompt: Smart Terror In 2017, after three years of operating a “hard strike” policy in Xinjiang—which involved instituting a passbook system that turned the Uyghur homeland into a what many considered an open-air prison, and deploying hundreds of thousands of security forces to monitor the families of those who had been disappeared or killed by the state—the government turned to a fresh strategy. A new regional party secretary named Chen Quanguo introduced a policy of “transforming” Uyghurs. Using the language of public health, local authorities began to describe the “three evil forces” of “religious extremism, ethnic separatism and violent terrorism” as three interrelated “ideological cancers.”  Because the digital sphere had allowed unauthorized forms of Islam to flourish, officials called for AI-enabled technology to detect and extirpate these evils. Already in 2015, Xi Jinping had announced that cybersecurity was a national priority; now Party leadership began to incentivize Chinese tech firms to build and develop technologies that could help the government control and modify Uyghur society. Billions of dollars in government contracts were awarded to build “smart” security systems across the Uyghur region.      The turn toward “transformation” coincided with breakthroughs in the AI-assisted computer systems that the Public Security Bureau rolled out in 2017 and brought together in the IJOP. The Chinese startup Meiya Pico began to market software to local and regional governments that was developed using state-supported research and could detect Uyghur language text and Islamic symbols embedded in images. The company also developed programs to automate the transcription and translation of Uyghur voice messaging.  The company Hikvision advertised tools that could automate the identification of Uyghur faces based on physiological phenotypes. High-resolution video cameras capable of operating in low-light conditions were linked to AI-enabled software trained on an extensive image database of racially diverse faces; together, these technologies could determine the ethnicity of a person based on the shape and color of the person’s facial features—all while the person strolled down street. A Leon Technology spokesperson told one of the country’s leading technology publications that the cameras were also integrated with an AI system made by Leon that could flag suspicious behavior and individuals under special surveillance “on the scale of seconds.” Other programs performed automated searches of Uyghurs’ internet activity and then compared the data it gleaned to school, job, banking, medical, and biometric records, looking for predictors of aberrant behavior.

Response: The rollout of this new technology required a great deal of manpower and technical training. Over 100,000 new police officers were hired. One of their jobs was to conduct the sort of health check Alim underwent, creating biometric records for almost every human being in the region. Face signatures were created by scanning individuals from a variety of different angles as they made different facial expressions; the result was a high-definition portfolio of personal emotions. All Uyghurs were required to install the Clean Net Guard app, which monitored everything they said, read, and wrote, and everyone they connected with, on their smartphones.  Higher-level officers, most of whom were Han, were given the job of conducting qualitative assessments of the Muslim population as a whole—providing more complex, interview-based survey data for IJOP’s deep-learning system. In face-to-face interviews, these neighborhood police officers assessed the more than 14 million Muslim-minority people in the province and determined if they should be given the rating of “safe,” “average,” or “unsafe.” They determined this by categorizing the person using ten or more categories: whether or not the person was Uyghur, of military age, or underemployed; whether they prayed regularly, possessed unauthorized religious knowledge, had a passport, had traveled to one of twenty-six Muslim-majority countries, had overstayed their visa, had an immediate relative living abroad, or had taught their children about Islam in their home. Those who were determined to be “unsafe” were then sent to the detention centers where they were interrogated and asked to confess their crimes and name others who were also “unsafe.” In this manner, the officers determined which individuals should be slotted for the “transformation through education” internment camps.  The assessments were iterative.  Many Muslims who passed their first assessment were subsequently detained because someone else named them as “unsafe.” In as many as tens of thousands of cases, years of WeChat history was used as evidence of the need for Uyghur suspects to be “transformed.” The state also assigned an additional 1.1 million Han and Uyghur “big brothers and sisters” to conduct week-long assessments on Uyghur families as uninvited guests in Uyghur homes. Over the course of these stays, the relatives tested the “safe” qualities of those Uyghurs that remained outside of the camp system by forcing them to participate in activities forbidden by certain forms of Islamic piety such as drinking, smoking, and dancing. As a test, they brought their Uyghur hosts food without telling them whether the meat used in the dishes was halal or not. These “big sisters and brothers” focused on the families of those who had been shot or taken away by the police over the past decade. They looked for any sign of resentment or any lack of enthusiasm in Chinese patriotic activities. They gave the children candy so that they would tell them the truth about what their parents thought. All of this information was entered into databases and then fed back into the IJOP.


Prompt: The IJOP is always running in the background of Uyghur life, always learning. The government’s hope is that it will run with ever less human guidance. The goal is both to intensify securitization in the region and to free up security labor for the work of “transformation through education.” Quantified Selves My first encounter with the face-scanning machines was at a hotel in the Uyghur district of Ürümchi in April 2018. Speaking in Uyghur, the man at the front desk told me I did not need to scan my face to register because I had foreign identification. But when I left the city on the high-speed train, Han officers instructed me on how to scan my passport picture and stand “just so” to enable the camera to get a good read of my face. Exiting the train an hour later in Turpan, my face had to be verified manually at the local police station. The officer in charge, a Han woman, told a young Uyghur officer to scan my passport photo with her smartphone and match that image with photos she took of my face. When I asked why this was necessary, the officer in charge said, “It is to keep you safe.”  As I moved through Uyghur towns and face-recognition checkpoints, I was surprised not to find handlers following me. When the officers at one checkpoint seemed to have anticipated my arrival, I realized the reason: cameras were now capable of tracking me with nearly as much precision as undercover police. My movements were being recorded and analyzed by deep learning systems. I, too, was training the IJOP.

Response: In order to avoid the cameras, I took unauthorized Uyghur taxis, ducked into Uyghur bookstores, and bummed hand-rolled cigarettes from Uyghur peddlers while I asked questions about the reeducation system. I hoped that slipping into the blind spots of the IJOP would help to protect the people I spoke with there. A few weeks after my trip, I heard that another American who had lived in the region for an extended period was interrogated by public security officers about my activities.


Prompt: In the tech community in the United States there is some skepticism regarding the viability of AI-assisted computer vision technology in China. Many experts I’ve spoken to from the AI policy world point to an article by the scholar Jathan Sadowski called “Potemkin AI,” which highlights the failures of Chinese security technology to deliver what it promises. They frequently bring up the way a system in Shenzhen meant to identify the faces of jaywalkers and flash them on jumbotrons next to busy intersections cannot keep up with the faces of all the jaywalkers; as a result, human workers sometimes have to manually gather the data used for public shaming. They point out that Chinese tech firms and government agencies have hired hundreds of thousands of low-paid police officers to monitor internet traffic and watch banks of video monitors. As with the theater of airport security rituals in the United States, many of these experts argue that it is the threat of surveillance, rather than the surveillance itself, that causes people to modify their behavior.

Response: Yet while there is a good deal of evidence to support this skepticism, a notable rise in the automated detection of internet-based Islamic activity, which has resulted in the detention of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, also points to the real effects of the implementation of AI-assisted surveillance and policing in Xinjiang. Even Western experts at Google and elsewhere admit that Chinese tech companies now lead the world in these computer vision technologies, due to the way the state funds Chinese companies to collect, monitor, utilize, and report on the personal data of hundreds of millions of users across China.


Prompt: In Kashgar, 1500 kilometers west of Ürümchi, I encountered dozens of Han civil servants who had been told to refer to themselves as “relatives.” Several of these “big brothers and sisters” spoke in glowing terms about the level of safety and security they felt in the Uyghur countryside. Uyghur communities, it seemed, were now safe for Han people. The IJOP tracks movements of Han people as well, but they experience this surveillance as frictionless. At railway stations, for example, they move through pre-approved “green lanes.” The same technology that restricts the movements of Uyghurs makes the movements of Han residents even freer.

Response: “Anyone who has been to Kashgar will know that the atmosphere there was really thick and imposing,” a Leon Technology spokesperson told reporters at the China-Eurasia Security Expo in 2017. He was implying that, in the past, the city felt too Uyghur. One of the Uyghur-tracking AI projects that Leon developed made that “thick atmosphere” easier for Han settlers and officials to breathe. “Through the continuous advancement of the project, we have a network of 10,000 video access points in the surrounding rural area, which will generate massive amounts of video,” the spokesperson said. “This many images will ‘bind’ many people.”  Like the rest of the IJOP, the Leon project helps the Chinese government to bind Uyghurs in many ways—by limiting their political and cultural expression, by trapping them within checkpoints and labor camps. The effect of these restrictions, and of the spectacle of Uyghur oppression, simultaneously amplifies the sense of freedom and authority of Han settlers and state authorities.  The Han officials I spoke with during my fieldwork in Xinjiang often refused to acknowledge the way disappearances, frequent police shootings of young Uyghur men, and state seizures of Uyghur land might have motivated earlier periods of Uyghur resistance. They did not see correlations between limits on Uyghur religious education, restrictions on Uyghur travel, and widespread job discrimination on the one hand, and the rise in Uyghur desires for freedom, justice, and religiosity on the other. Because of the crackdown, Han officials have seen a profound diminishment of Islamic belief and political resistance in Uyghur social life. They’re proud of the fervor with which Uyghurs are learning the “common language” of the country, abandoning Islamic holy days, and embracing Han cultural values. From their perspective, the implementation of the new security systems has been a monumental success.


Prompt: A middle-aged Uyghur businessman from Hotan, whom I will call Dawut, told me that that, behind the checkpoints, the new security system has hollowed out Uyghur communities. The government officials, civil servants, and tech workers who have come to build, implement, and monitor the system don’t seem to perceive Uyghurs’ humanity. The only kind of Uyghur life that can be recognized by the state is the one that the computer sees. This makes Uyghurs like Dawut feel as though their lives only matter as data—code on a screen, numbers in camps. They have adapted their behavior, and slowly even their thoughts, to the system.   “Uyghurs are alive, but their entire lives are behind walls,” Dawut said softly. “It is like they are ghosts living in another world.” Almost every day, I receive an email from Google Alerts about a new article on China’s “social credit system.” It is rare that I encounter an article that does not contain several factual errors and gross mischaracterizations. The social credit system is routinely described as issuing “citizen scores” to create a “digital dictatorship” where “big data meets Big Brother.” These descriptions are wildly off-base. Foreign media has distorted the social credit system into a technological dystopia far removed from what is actually happening in China. Jeremy Daum, a legal scholar at Yale Law School’s China Center, has suggested that part of why the misreporting persists is because the United States and Europe project their fears about extensive digital surveillance in their own societies onto China’s rapid technological rise. Compounded by the rhetoric around a US-China “arms race” in developing artificial intelligence, the idea that China might somehow perfect an exportable model of a totalitarian surveillance state has made people more willing to believe exaggerated accounts of the social credit system.

Response: In response to the misreporting, several researchers have attempted to correct the narrative with well-documented examples of where foreign press coverage gets things wrong. Common mistakes include the assumption that all surveillance technology in China feeds into a centralized database, that every recordable action is assigned a point value and deducted from a comprehensive score, and that everyone in China receives such a score.


Prompt: In reality, social credit is a broad policy project for encouraging individuals, business, legal institutions, and government itself to be more “trustworthy” (守信, shouxin) through a mix of measures. These measures include the blacklisting of lawbreakers, the “red-listing” of those with exemplary records, and a range of rewards and punishments. In a few places, it also involves localized and experimental scoring systems that are meant to incentivize “better” behavior.  Some of the mischaracterized accounts in foreign media are understandable given the loose use of the phrase “social credit” (社会信用, shehui xinyong) in China. One law professor I spoke to in Beijing encouraged me to think of it as a “working term,” an umbrella category encompassing several moving parts of a broader policy agenda that includes both national initiatives as well as city-level pilot projects that do not generalize to a countrywide scale.  Just because the social credit system is less comprehensive than it appears in foreign media reports does not mean that it is incapable of causing harm, of course. Moreover, the Chinese government maintains a sophisticated and pervasive surveillance apparatus, which it regularly uses to curtail the civil rights of its citizens. It’s not so difficult to imagine how the misguided belief that the social credit system centrally integrates other state-operated surveillance technologies may have originated, given the troubling creation of DNA databases in Xinjiang and police procurement of facial recognition technology across the country.   But the social credit system as it currently exists is not aimed at Orwellian social control. Rather, the cluster of policy initiatives designated by the term are intended to promote greater trust—namely, trust between companies and their customers, and between citizens and the government. This trust-building can serve both economic and political ends. While many of the problems that the government uses to justify the need for a social credit system have economic considerations at their core—improving food safety, punishing debtors, cracking down on counterfeit goods sold online—others fit a broader theme of promoting institutional trust, such as by penalizing those who produce misleading or forged academic research.

Response: Taken as a whole, the range of goals that the social credit system aims to address may suggest that the government is itself unsure, and is still in the process of figuring out, what such a system can accomplish. But the system’s most widely publicized aspect in China is how it punishes those deemed “untrustworthy”—which is also where the greatest potential for harm lies. Yet the techniques that the Chinese government is using to enact these punishments are not especially unique—some of them are already ubiquitous in the United States. In fact, the two countries’ approach to trust-building is more similar than one might expect.  Blacklists with Teeth The core mechanism of the Chinese social credit system is the creation of blacklists. The government uses blacklists to punish people for various infringements of the law that fall short of being considered criminal activity. Commonly blacklisted subjects include people who have the means to repay debt they owe but choose not to, colloquially referred to as 老赖 (laolai). The Supreme People’s Court, the highest court in China, complies a national blacklist of “judgment defaulters,” people who have not complied with court orders. These orders are typically financial in nature, related to repaying debts. But they can also include other kinds of instructions, such as making a formal apology to an injured party or regularly visiting one’s elderly parents.  Punishments for landing on certain blacklists include being barred from taking civil service jobs, from sending one’s children to private schools, and from booking air travel or riding “soft-sleeper cars” on trains—the most comfortable railway compartment class for long journeys.  The social credit system is often compared to the dang’an (档案) system, a set of government dossiers on Chinese citizens recording the minutiae of their lives, from expressions of political thought to their performance at school, compiled from accounts by peers and local authorities. But a closer point of comparison is the government blacklisting that predates the development of the social credit system. Blacklists provided more concise judgments about alleged misdeeds, but they have long been considered ineffective at changing people’s behavior. In the past, even though some blacklists were printed in newspapers and screened before previews at films, many people were unaware that they were blacklisted and continued to go about their lives without suffering any consequences. Courts send blacklist notifications to judgment defaulters now, but many of these continue to go unnoticed. The social credit system is meant to give blacklists teeth.


Prompt: How? One way is by encouraging and enabling different government agencies to pool information. Under the social credit system, several government bureaus have not only developed their own blacklists, but to date have signed forty memoranda of understanding that enable them to share information with one another to ensure that blacklisted individuals are duly punished.  Another way that the social credit system strengthens blacklists is by fostering closer communication not just within government but between government and industry—in particular, with China’s biggest technology firms. Previously, people who could not purchase airline tickets through official channels if they were blacklisted might have still managed to use websites like CTrip.com or the in-app travel booking feature of the mobile wallet service Alipay to circumvent these restrictions. That is no longer possible under agreements that these companies and several dozen others have signed with China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the powerful government body that has spearheaded the social credit system’s development.  According to available government and state media reports, one type of agreement, called “information sharing,” involves companies receiving government-issued blacklists, which they then match to their user base in order to prevent blacklisted people from performing certain activities like buying airplane tickets. Another kind of agreement, called “joint rewards and punishments,” restricts the behavior of blacklisted individuals even further: blacklisted users of Alipay, for instance, are unable to buy so-called “luxury items”—although it is unclear whether it is Alipay or the government that determines which items fall into this category.   By forging partnerships with Chinese technology companies, the state ensures that blacklisted people can’t avoid punishment. These partnerships make it harder for individuals to evade restrictions in the non-state economy, which is otherwise farther outside of the government’s sphere of control. But they also open the door to the possibility of a much more expansive social credit system, since technology companies have a wealth of information about Chinese citizens. Still, it remains unclear when and how companies might share their data with the state—although it would be difficult for them to avoid doing so if asked.

Response: Webs of Trust In addition to blacklisting, China also has “red-listing.” This involves identifying people whose behavior is considered exemplary of “trustworthiness,” which includes paying bills and taxes on time or, in some cities, doing volunteer work and donating blood.  There are also more specialized examples of how rewards are granted: the government has a national “action plan” for encouraging young people to do volunteer work, and those volunteers recognized as outstanding are red-listed. The benefits they receive as a result include having their job applications to Tencent prioritized, paying discounted mobile phone rates through Alibaba, getting coupons for shopping on Alibaba’s ecommerce site TMall, and enjoying free accomodations for 300 overseas volunteers in an AliTravel-sponsored program. The state may at some point also share information about their “red lists” with tech companies in order to confer more benefits. For instance, ride-sharing behemoth Didi Chuxing has partnered with the NDRC “Xinyi+” (信易+, akin to “credit convenience”) project, which may begin to offer red-listed riders discounts, priority booking of cabs, and deposit-free bike rentals.  In some instances, blacklists are adapting to new media while retaining their original function of shaming people into changing their behavior. The enormously popular social video streaming app TikTok (抖音, douyin) has partnered with a local court in Nanning, Guangxi to display photographs of blacklisted people as advertisements between videos, in some cases offering reward payments for information about these people’s whereabouts that are a percentage of the amount of money the person owes. Much like the other apps and websites that take part in these state-sponsored efforts, TikTok does not disclose in its user-facing terms of service that it works with the local government of Nanning, and potentially other cities, to publicly shame blacklisted individuals.


Prompt: A similar initiative is taking place in the Yuhua district of Shijiazhuang, the capital city of Hebei Province. There, local courts have opted to offer a WeChat “mini-program”—a limited-purpose feature nested within the popular chat app WeChat—known as a “Laolai Map.” This map displays blacklisted people, companies, and other organizations within a given area, alongside slogans such as “Recognize laolai, avoid risks.” It’s not clear if real-time location data or individuals’ home addresses are used to populate the map. The mini-program also enables users to look up blacklisted entities with a search function, and to see the offenses that landed them on the blacklist in the first place. While some descriptions are straightforward, such as “failure to report property ownership,” most are simply listed as defaulting on court orders without going into further detail.

Response: Other state-tech collaborations are more ambitious in scope. For example, the budding “credit cities” concept is a spin on “smart cities” that involves tech companies building out digital scoring platforms that use a mix of government data and private sector data. With such initiatives, people who are deemed more trustworthy can rent bicycles and even apartments without providing a deposit, or delay immediate payment for cab rides and hospital visits. The participation of large tech companies in these ventures tends to be downplayed, as the credit city platforms are associated with their respective municipal governments and generally rely on smaller local firms.Still, details on the specifics of these partnerships are scarce. While major Chinese tech companies are not serving the social credit system the way foreign media has thus far portrayed—surveillance cameras are not using facial recognition to link misbehavior to a centralized scoring database, for instance—the ways in which they do partner with the state to coproduce the system are generally kept from the public’s eye. What little we know comes from news coverage of the signing ceremonies held when tech companies conclude agreements with the NDRC. At each of these, representatives of the companies’ senior leadership refer to their joint efforts as a form of social responsibility. The CEO of Meituan-Dianping, an online group-buying and food delivery service, notably said that co-constructing a social credit system is “every industry's—especially platform-based internet companies'—duty-bound responsibility.”  But how effective is the social credit system at improving “trustworthiness”? Thus far, state media has portrayed blacklists strengthened by the social credit system as having succeeded at encouraging people to be more honest and to break the law less often. The official news agency Xinhua, for instance, praised Ant Financial’s use of blacklist data to restrict certain purchases via mobile wallet app Alipay and to lower scores in its Sesame Credit credit scoring product, arguing that the company’s punishment of 1.2 million debt defaulters encouraged over 100,000 of them to repay their debts.


Prompt: It’s difficult to confirm how such assessments are made, or whether blacklisting actually influences behavior at scale, especially considering how many people consider themselves to have been wrongfully blacklisted, or who find it unfair that they are blacklisted for deceased relatives’ debt. Still, it’s likely having some effect: a recent book by Ant Financial employees claimed that within a month of directly notifying Sesame Credit users that they were blacklisted for being in debt, 46% of those users paid off their debt.The Market for Blacklists The use of blacklists to promote trust is by no means confined to China. It is also pervasive in the United States, although it takes a different form.

Response: Blacklisting under the Chinese social credit system is a fairly overt means of influencing behavior. Blacklists are developed and enforced by the state. By contrast, similar practices in the US tends to be more covert. Private firms develop lists of people who have committed minor transgressions, and generally sell these in their capacity as data brokers in a relatively under-regulated market. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) of 1970 reined in many types of invasive data collection that could be used as informal credit ratings. But plenty of other kinds have slipped through the cracks or are FCRA-compliant, creating hidden yet technically legal data judgments that affect the lives of millions of Americans.One example is systematically compiled lists of retail employees accused—not convicted—of shoplifting. These FCRA-compliant databases have barred people from being hired in other sales positions. Background check databases acquire these records to compile what one lawyer has referred to as a “secret blacklist,” given that employees accused of shoplifting are often made to write statements confessing that they committed the theft even in cases where they had not. They are typically unaware that these admission statements feed into such databases, which are consulted when they apply for other retail jobs.  On the customer-facing side, databases developed by firms such as The Retail Equation track people who display the characteristics of conducting “return fraud,” by looking at items they have bought, how often they made returns, whether returns were accompanied by receipts, and how much money was issued per return. Using real name-registered forms of identification such as driver’s licenses, these databases are able to track people across multiple retailers. The consequences for people on these lists include being unable to return or exchange goods at certain stores for a year. Notably, if records across different retailers are kept separate within the database, they are not treated as credit reports and therefore do not run afoul of the FCRA.An additional practice with severe consequences has emerged in the housing rental market, with New York’s so-called “tenant blacklist.” Tenant-landlord disputes taken to housing courts form a record that can even work against tenants who have won their cases. Rental screening data brokers mine housing court filings across the city to create databases of every tenant sued in housing court, regardless of the outcome of each case. Despite how little context is provided in these databases, landlords nonetheless check them when deciding whether to accept a potential tenant.


Prompt: The database only indicates that a tenant was sued in housing court without listing the outcome (including if the tenant won) or cause (landlords have been known to raise cases in efforts to evict rent-stabilized tenants) of the case. Yet the mere appearance of a tenant’s name on a blacklist is presented as negative in and of itself. In a non-surprising parallel to Chinese blacklists, people often first find out they were on the tenant blacklist after having failed to secure housing and consulting a lawyer to find out why. An unhoused New York woman with no criminal record and a credit score of 760 was unable to secure an apartment reserved for the low-income elderly because of a tenant blacklist. The repackaging of blacklist data can amplify and distort their significance, yet they will persist as long as they profit data brokers, and in part for a failure to imagine viable alternatives. Notably, one of the proposed solutions to dealing with potential tenant-landlord disputes in cities like New York is to ask to remain anonymous in cases taken to housing court. The social credit system has yet to cover the fraud-ridden housing markets of China, though were a similar issue to arise, anonymity would be difficult to preserve under the nationwide push for real-name registration both on- and offline. Ant Financial, the fintech giant behind credit rating service Sesame Credit, has partnered with NDRC’s “Xinyi+” project to use the company’s data on individual and enterprise users’ finances in order to help landlords make decisions about housing and office rentals.

Response: Listening to the Laolai In both the US and China, blacklisting systems enforce broad punishments that are disproportionate to the transgressions that land people on blacklists. Likewise, the burden falls on the blacklisted individual to discover they are being systematically prevented from taking certain actions and to figure out how to remedy their situation.  Demanding greater transparency and accountability from both systems has been a challenge, although US efforts have been more successful. In the US, activists have successfully pushed back against certain forms of blacklisting for violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Civil society and legal aid organizations have also spent years monitoring, and attempting to curb, various practices embedded in using ambiguous personal data for blacklisting.


Prompt: In China, by contrast, there is less room for such activity. For one, it’s unclear how credit legislation could be used to mount comparable efforts. And, although a few Chinese consumer protection organizations have become attuned to the ways that tech firms’ use of customer data can lead to privacy abuses, they have not taken up the issue of blacklists because the practice is treated as socially acceptable in China.  Some avenues for contesting cases where people believe they are wrongfully blacklisted do exist, but they are unlikely to be widely known. In places like Shanghai and Hubei, local social credit regulations lay out steps for filing “objection applications” where individuals have found credit information to be incorrect or omitted. Yet, given the scope of what counts as “credit information,” it may be difficult for non-experts to understand and make a case for why their records should be modified. Moreover, it’s unclear if the punishments for being blacklisted leave individuals enough room to redeem themselves, or if the constraints are so stringent that they create insurmountable obstacles to clearing one’s name.

Response: The current state of the social credit system is far less sophisticated than its portrayal in the foreign press. But if the scope of what can count as blacklist data widens, and if the tech sector takes an even more pervasive “searchlight” approach to seamlessly melding these data into their core offerings, the system could move much closer to the dystopian picture that appears in the media. In particular, if China embraces the marketization of blacklist data—so that data is bought and sold, like in the US—information about individuals would become even harder to track and contest.  Over the next few years, the Chinese government will continue to tinker with implementing the social credit system. People who are wholly unaffected by blacklists may view them favorably, as proof that the government is proactively combating the laolai phenomenon. Yet there needs to be a critical analysis of the social credit system that centers the perspectives of those who are most directly affected. We need to hear from the laolai themselves to understand what the unforeseen consequences of this vast policy project may be. Only then can we begin to see what the social credit system is actually achieving—and at what cost.


Prompt: It was nearly 4 a.m. in China when I hit play on the video entitled “Zhao Benshan: King of Poetry!”, but the ghosts of a thousand past viewers were still distracting me with their chatter. The video is a remix collage of CCTV Spring Festival Gala skits starring iconic comedian Zhao Benshan—source material familiar to anyone who grew up near a TV in China—edited and AutoTune’d into a military-grade earworm. But I could barely piece that together through the fog of text left behind by previous viewers: laments about the catchiness of the song, compliments to creators, jokes, and echoes of favorite lyrics. In the end, I had to watch the video twice, as I often do on the social video site Bilibili: once with the bullet comments turned off so that I could follow the source material, and once more for the real experience, the chitchat obscuring the content.

Response: Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute. When a beloved character dies in a web series, a river of grieving kaomoji (╥﹏╥)—a kind of emoticon first popularized in Japan—washes over whatever happens next. A child’s overly honest response to a TV anchor’s question triggers a blizzard of different ways to signify laughter (2333, 哈哈哈哈). When the (Chinese) good guy punches out the (American) bad guy in 2017’s blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2, jingoistic cries of “Long live China!” erupt across the screen. Each comment is synchronized to an exact moment in the video, and will fly across the screen on cue on every subsequent replay. On particularly popular videos, they pile up so thick that they can cover the original entirely. The result is a viscerally social experience, like an opening night crowd at a movie theater that you can summon anytime.


Prompt: In the West, the Chinese internet is mostly depicted in negative terms: what websites and social platforms are blocked, what keywords are banned, what conversations and viral posts are scrubbed clean from the web overnight. This austere view is not inaccurate, but it leaves out what exactly the nearly 750 million internet users in China do get up to.

Response: Take a look at bullet comments, and you’ll have a decent answer to that question. They represent the essence of Chinese internet culture: fast-paced and impish, playfully collaborative, thick with rapidly evolving inside jokes and memes. They are a social feature beloved by a generation known for being antisocial. And most importantly, they allow for a type of spontaneous, cumulative, and public conversation between strangers that is increasingly rare on the Chinese internet.


Prompt: Stray Bullets Like much of what’s popular on the Chinese internet, bullet comments are an invasive species from Japan. When China’s borders loosened to enable freer trade and travel in the 1980s, Japan's well-established media industries were the best positioned, both geographically and culturally, to take advantage of the wide-eyed new market. Alongside Nikon cameras and Yamaha keyboards, Japanese “ACG”—animation, comics, and games—rushed into China. For Chinese kids growing up during the 1990s, manga and anime series like Doraemon, Sailor Moon, Slam Dunk, and One Piece became important cultural touchstones.

Response: The most fervent fans began creating infrastructure to feed their hobby. Resellers smuggled or imported books, videos, and merchandise from Japan, sometimes via Taiwan and Hong Kong. Volunteer groups developed efficient pipelines for distributing and subtitling the latest episodes of anime shows first on VHS tapes, then online. Organizers created offline and online events and conventions for fans to gather. All of this activity opened the door to even more widespread interest in ACG in later generations. A recent industry report estimates that there are 300 million self-identified ACG fans in China, and that 97 percent of them were “post-’90s” and “post-’00s”—the generations defined by being born after 1990 and 2000, respectively.


Prompt: When a Japanese site called Niconico invented the idea of writing comments directly on top of YouTube videos in 2006, it took less than a year for a clone of the platform to appear in China. In Japanese, the system was named 弹幕 (danmaku), or “bullet curtain,” after a subgenre of hardcore shoot-em-up games in which enemies fly in formation across the screen, like the famous arcade game Galaga on steroids. Both kinds of danmaku—the games and the comments—required their audience to process an overwhelming amount of visual stimulation at high speeds.

Response: In China, several sites seeking to clone the Niconico experience copied the feature, as well as the Japanese characters for the name, which are pronounced “danmu” in Chinese. Today, the most successful of these clones by far is Bilibili, a social video site that has become an entertainment staple for young people in China.


Prompt: Like many of the other video platforms in China, Bilibili combines officially licensed shows and movies (both domestic and international) with user-uploaded videos and livestreams. ACG content still dominates the site, but Bilibili’s hordes of bullet commenters can now react to just about everything else too: makeup tutorials, documentaries, music videos, vintage commercials, and “Kichiku,” a Niconico-originated genre of manic Auto-Tune’d parody remixes such as the one of Zhao Benshan mentioned above.

Response: Bilibili isn’t China’s biggest video platform by a long shot, but it does maintain an unusually tight grip on youth culture: over 90 percent of Bilibili’s 93 million monthly active users are under the age of twenty-five. Bilibili’s finger on this pulse has translated into major financial success: the company has, at time of writing, a market capitalization of $5.41 billion on the New York Stock Exchange. It’s also the primary sponsor of one of China’s most popular basketball teams, which Yao Ming was playing for when he was discovered by the NBA and which he now owns: the Shanghai Bilibili Sharks. Even the central government has embraced the platform in a bid to reach young people: in January 2019, Bilibili was one of two video sites chosen to distribute a government-commissioned, domestically produced anime series about the life of Karl Marx. During the opening sequence of the first episode, the bullet comments are a blizzard of check-ins from high schools and colleges around the country.


Prompt: As the rest of the Chinese media industry tries to replicate Bilibili's success with the coveted post-’90s demographic, bullet comments have spread from platform to platform as if by airborne spores. Nearly every major video site in China—Youku, Tencent Video, iQiYi—now has a bullet comment feature, as do most of the biggest live-streaming platforms. In fact, many of them actually have Bilibili’s exact bullet comment feature, which was open-sourced by the company in 2015. The invasive social feature can also be found in more unlikely places: apps for reading comics or streaming music, e-commerce platforms, even narrative cutscenes in the middle of popular mobile games. Bullet comments have become a ubiquitous social layer woven into any digital experience.

Response: The Primordial Soup of Memes Li Moqiang, cofounder of the Chinese electronics company Xiaomi, describes his first encounter with bullet comments in his 2014 book 参与感 ("Togetherness"). Fifteen minutes in, his eyes were watering. He felt overwhelmed, and had trouble focusing on anything. But after enduring it for another thirty minutes, he found that he had developed the ability to switch his attention between the comments and the underlying video at will—a sort of Magic Eye trick for processing content and commentary at the same time.


Prompt: Tech leaders like Li are willing to risk eye strain to pay attention to bullet comments because the fast-paced conversations and roasting sessions they enable beget many of the memes and trends that eventually infect Weibo, WeChat, and the rest of the Chinese internet. Individual bullet comments rarely go over a dozen characters, so commenters rely on a rich repertoire of text-based memes—from internet shorthand to clever wordplay on ancient Chinese sayings—to express themselves efficiently. Even for people fluent in Chinese, deciphering a video’s worth of bullet comments can be a crash course in internet tropes, rudimentary Japanese, Chinese history, regional stereotypes, and continuously updated pop culture references.  On top of trading witticisms, bullet commenters also play informal, emergent games with each other and with the content. Commenters will synchronize their comments to create a wall of text that shields future viewers from gruesome or scary shots, or create 五毛特效 (“fifty-cent special effects”) like populating a night sky full of ASCII stars. Other commenters spontaneously collaborate to generate subtitles in various languages—both earnest and facetious—as "the Eight-Nation Alliance Caption Club,” a wry reference to the international military coalition that invaded China following the Boxer Rebellion. If a character in a show holds up a sudoku puzzle for even a second, a bullet commenter will probably try to solve it.

Response: To maintain a healthy comment culture on a platform where any toxicity would be literally foregrounded, Bilibili has taken an approach to community management that feels downright heretical in the growth-obsessed tech industry. While any visitor to the site can watch its videos, only fully registered members are allowed to upload videos or leave a bullet comment. Currently, registration involves passing a hundred-question test about anime trivia (“In the Fate series, which magic is the Einzborn family fighting over the Holy Grail in hopes of recovering?”) and bullet comment etiquette (“Which of the below comments is not trolling? A. Should I use cilantro or not? B. I don’t want to be a person anymore C. Which kind of tofu is most delicious? D. This show isn’t as good as XX” [The answer is B.]).  Incredibly, this is actually the simplified version: the test was once even longer and more difficult to pass, earning it the nickname the “Chinese otaku high school examination” in reference to the infamous, grueling, week-long test that single-handedly determines college admissions around the country. Despite this significant hurdle, 31 million users have completed the Bilibili registration process, many with the help of cheat sheets circulated around the internet. This self-enforced gatekeeping process has given the site an unique advantage on a playing field where any feature can be cloned: a community and a bullet comment culture widely regarded as the best around.


Prompt: Heat and Noise 热闹 (rè nào) is hard to concisely translate into English with its personality intact. Literally meaning "heat and noise," it describes an atmosphere of bustling conviviality: a balance point between hygge and lit. A night market sizzling with smells and chatter is re nao, as is a table-slapping game of mahjong after a big family meal. Re nao is as central to the Chinese vision of the good life as freedom is to America’s; it’s deep-rooted in a way that defies rationality.  For young Chinese people, bullet comments are a dose of re nao that fits better into their lives than the karaoke, mahjong, and alcohol-fueled banquets preferred by their elders. The post-’90s generation is stereotyped—and often self-identifies—as shut-ins. A Peking University study of 3000 post-’90s people from across China found that 62 percent ranked “staying at home to surf the web” as their favorite activity. “Hanging out with friends” came in at 39 percent, while “going to the bar” was ranked lowest, at only 3.4 percent.  This shift away from traditional conviviality is a consequence of societal changes that uniquely impact the younger generation. As people move away from their hometowns and alma maters, traditional social bonds fray. They are then further strained by the urban sprawl that makes it challenging to keep up with friends in the same city. Many members of the post-’90s generation are also exhausted from the “996” work culture that has taken root in Chinese startups and other young companies: 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week, with no overtime pay. It’s easy to see the appeal of anonymous togetherness on Bilibili, a shortcut to re nao that requires no jostling commute, no reservation at a crowded restaurant, no friends in the same city or neighborhood.

Response: The hyper-re nao enabled by internet features like bullet comments might be one of the more potent drugs ever created. In the US, we are just starting to understand the potential dangers of this high—how the addictive thrill of online togetherness can leave lonely people vulnerable to radicalization, how the echoing of one’s opinions by a crowd will always be more compelling than any fact. But the Chinese government has long been attuned to the thin line between a carnival and a riot; after all, the Cultural Revolution, a display of youthful re nao gone very wrong if there ever was one, is in living memory for everyone in charge.


Prompt: In recent years, that insight has led the government to encourage more siloed digital nooks, such as WeChat’s 500-person-max group chats, and to more heavily police the open digital spaces where enough strangers can congregate to become a problem. The type of digital spaces, in other words, that bullet comments enable.  The government’s embrace of Bilibili, then, may just be a way of keeping it on a tight leash. In 2017, Bilibili’s app was temporarily pulled from mobile stores as part of a larger crackdown on “unproductive culture,” which also saw hip-hop artists with tattoos banned from television. This warning shot was fired despite the politically apathetic, if not downright patriotic tone of most comments on the site: Bilibili users are much more likely to bicker over whether Marvel or DC is the superior provider of superhero movies than to poke fun at Party leadership. But it is the very strength of its capacity for re nao that makes bullet comments a politically risky format: a crowd, no matter how anime-obsessed, just needs the right spark to become a mob.

Response: In October 2017, the 5th Plenary of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China announced the future direction of Chinese economic development: Fully develop the basic role of consumption in economic growth; focus on expanding household consumption; steer consumption in intelligent, green, healthy, and safe directions; and focus on expanding service consumption to promote the upgrading of consumption.  It was easy to miss the point amidst all the droning officialese. Small wonder, then, that government bodies and the business community simplified this directive into four easy-to-remember characters: 消费升级 (xiaofeishengji), “consumption upgrade.” In the past three years, the phrase has appeared in the policy documents of eleven provinces and autonomous regions, a dozen cities, the Ministry of Commerce (MoC), and China’s top executive body, the State Council.  The aim of the “consumption upgrade” is simple: to transition from an investment-driven economy powered by industry to a consumption-driven economy sustained by a consumer society. Promoting domestic consumption isn’t a new priority: the Chinese Communist Party has pursued this goal since at least the late 1990s, when the 1997 Asian financial crisis alerted the country’s leadership to the perils of an export-driven economy. But it has acquired more urgency in recent years, as investment-driven growth has slowed.  Moreover, the internet offers a powerful new tool for building a consumer society, one that the government believes will play a crucial role in China’s economic transition. The MoC, at a press conference in late 2017, identified the internet as a “channel” that would make the “consumption upgrade” possible—specifically, by linking populations in rural and remote regions with high-quality goods at low cost, ensuring that economic development reaches the whole population.  As a result, you might expect the Chinese Communist Party to love Pinduoduo (PDD), the group-buying app founded in 2015. PDD works like Groupon, but rather than events and services, the app’s listings are primarily consumer items, from fresh fruit to diapers to home electronics. According to a 2018 study by venture capital firm GGV Capital, around 60 percent of PDD’s users come from less developed regions of China, and the deals are considerable: 399 RMB ($60) for a LED TV, for example.


Prompt: To top it off, the interface is addicting: cartoon-like icons on a red background; daily lotteries and games through which shoppers can win further discounts; and the ability to share your finds and recruit friends to buy together via WeChat, China’s biggest social media app. These attractions helped make PDD the youngest-ever Chinese startup to be listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. At its IPO in July 2018, PDD raised $1.6 billion.  Yet for all its success, PDD has encountered constant trouble from the Chinese government. Why? The prevalence of counterfeit goods on the platform. Shortly after PDD’s IPO, the State Administration for Market Regulation called for an investigation of sales of counterfeit products on the app. Social media users shared images of “Shrap” TVs and “Phelips” razors listed for sale, while an anonymous blogger wrote a widely read post accusing PDD of “set[ting] China back in its “hard and bitter trade war…one of the core objectives of which is to showcase how far we have come in intellectual property awareness.” More recently, in March 2018, a rumor circulated on Chinese social media that in 2017 alone, WeChat blocked links sent from PDD more than 1000 times, presumably in response to government pressure.  The PDD controversy isn’t just about fake goods, however. There is a deeper dynamic at play. By using platforms like PDD, rural residents are staking a claim to China’s digital sphere. The Chinese internet has long catered to the urban middle classes. To Wu Changchang, a professor of communications at East China Normal University, the “invisible minority” of rural users “didn’t have any discursive power before.” Now, rural users are making themselves visible to the rest of the country in a radically new way—and provoking a confrontation with the state in the process.

Response: Paper Towels and Tasty Fruits The countryside has immense importance to the Chinese Communist Party. Urban population only surpassed the rural population for the first time in 2011, and over forty percent of Chinese citizens still live outside cities. Economic development—and in particular, bringing an estimated 1.3 million people in rural areas out of poverty each year—has long been the basis of the party’s legitimacy. With rural incomes rising at an estimated 10 percent each year, compared with 5 to 6 percent in the cities, the countryside is also expected to boost China’s growth and consumption figures in the next decade.


Prompt: On September 20, 2018, the State Council released a policy document that outlined how the government plans to promote growth in the countryside going forward. It defined the “consumption upgrade” for rural towns and villages as an effort to increase not just the quantity but the quality of what people buy—literally, in the form of higher-quality products, but also by changing the nature of of spending from necessities to “telecommunications, cultural and leisure products, automobiles, and e-commerce in general.” Getting rural users to embrace e-commerce can be challenging, however. One problem is the lower rates of rural connectivity: according to a 2017 study conducted by the China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC), the government body responsible for internet affairs in China, the countryside accounted for 43 percent of China’s total population but only 27 percent of all of China’s internet users. Even when rural users do have internet access, simply connecting them to products isn’t enough to ensure that they can afford to buy them. China has one of the world’s most unequal societies, and its countryside is poor: according to the National Bureau of Statistics, per capita income in rural areas is 39 percent that of the per capita income of urbanites.

Response: This is where PDD comes in. The app has been remarkably successful in popularizing e-commerce among rural residents by giving them access to cheap goods. To PDD’s user base, affordability is essential. Wang Qunhong, a twenty-nine-year-old migrant worker from Ji’an, Jiangxi, put it to me this way: “The important thing about PDD is that it’s cheap, it really is.” She feels that the mainstream media had blown the fake goods controversy out of proportion. “You do find knockoffs, but you can’t say it’s all bad; you can find stuff as good as you’re willing to pay for,” she said.


Prompt: Li Yinghui, a thirty-nine-year-old housewife in the village of Heyang, Zhejiang, agrees. “Wages around here aren’t high enough for me to be shopping online every day,” she told me. Low wages aren’t the only factor that constrain Li’s capacity to participate in e-commerce. “My phone can’t even run most [apps]; it’s a cheap one that I bought for 1,000 yuan ($150),” she explained. Her fifty-six-year-old neighbor, Zha Xiaolong, is even less interested in letting mobile technology change his habits. “What’s an app?” he asked as he squinted over the top of his screen. “I only use WeChat.” These are the obstacles that PDD has overcome so successfully to become a major platform for rural e-commerce. A 2018 study estimated that 40 percent of PDD’s users live outside even “fourth-tier” cities in China. “Those inside [Beijing’s] Fifth Ring Road won’t have heard of us,” PDD’s founder Colin Huang told the magazine Caijing, arguing that he was bringing the government’s vaunted “consumption upgrade” to the countryside. Upgrading consumption “doesn’t mean letting people in Shanghai live like Parisians,” he explained, “but letting the people of Anqing in Anhui province have paper towels and tasty fruits.” Viral Vulgarity From the government’s perspective, building a consumer society in the countryside is essential for economic development. Platforms like PDD are clearly serving that goal. Yet if you give people tools for participating in the national economy, you have to expect them to use them for their own ends—and this often gives visibility to economic conditions and desires that contradict the image of the modern nation that the government wants to project.

Response: The urban-rural gap in China is not just an economic divide in consumption power but a cultural divide based on consumption habits. Rural residents don’t just consume cheaper goods. They consume different kinds of goods—including, in some cases, ones that the government may not approve of. This is no less true in online media than in e-commerce. If counterfeit goods on e-commerce platforms popular with rural users pose a challenge to the government, so too does “vulgar” content on social media apps popular with the same demographic. In both cases, the successful push to bring the countryside online has yielded unexpected consequences that the government is struggling to control.


Prompt: The conflict over online media is aptly demonstrated by two other apps that have frequently showed up on the authorities’ watchlist: Jinri Toutiao and Kuaishou (called “Kwai” in English). Jinri Toutiao is a news aggregator, while Kwai enables users to watch, create, and share short videos. Both draw a large portion of their user base from less developed regions. (As of 2017, five of Kwai’s top ten most followed accounts hailed from “rust belt” communities in China’s economically depressed northeast.) And both have been hit with accusations of being “vulgar” (低俗 disu).

Response: The content that has been criticized includes scantily clad women, tattooed gang members, domestic violence, pregnant teens showing off their bellies, and would-be “pranksters” groping women on the subway. It also includes cross-dressers, obese individuals, off-key singers, and hanmai performers—amateur rappers who record themselves shouting over the beats of small-town nightclubs—whose enthusiastic (if not exactly polished) acts have won them millions of fans around China.


Prompt: Such material has caused Kwai to come under public scrutiny in a way very reminiscent of PDD. In 2016, the writer Huo Qiming published an influential essay on WeChat called “A Brutal Grassroots Saga: China’s Countryside Within an App.” He graphically describes the violent stunts that rural users perform in videos on Kwai, such as a farmer lighting firecrackers under his groin and a teenager who grins and eats a live snake on camera. And he blames China’s urban-centric economic development and the underrepresentation of the countryside in official media for forcing the rural population to risk their health and safety to gain a national following and a few hundred RMB with corporate sponsorships (selling, Huo adds, “inferior and counterfeit products”).

Response: These views are clearly shared by government officials, who have repeatedly cracked down on Kwai. The authorities have twice ordered Kwai to “rectify” its content, and CCTV, the main state television broadcaster, has singled it out for criticism. WeChat banned the sharing of Kwai content for six months, only lifting its restrictions in October 2018. A month later, Kwai briefly disappeared from the Android app store.


Prompt: Similarly, Jinri Toutiao has endured heavy criticism for vulgarity and faced government pressure as a result. In November 2018, the platform’s “life stories” channel was put on a one-month hiatus for “erotic content,” following the appearance of viral essays with titles like, “Her one-night stand turned out to be her new supervisor.” To date, the app has been taken offline many times, and hundreds of user accounts have been closed down.

Response: In January 2019, the China Netcasting Services Association, an industry association authorized by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, issued new guidelines that required short-video platforms to review every piece of content before it goes online to ensure that it does not contradict official political positions of the Party, or promote vulgarity, violence, gambling, drug use, superstition, ethnic division, or sex. Another article in the regulations suggested video apps should try to attract “mainstream media” and Party or military-affiliated organizations to open accounts, in order to “improve the provision of positive and high-quality content.” As with PDD, though, apps like Kwai and Jinri Toutiao have their defenders. To them, the platform’s content is an authentic expression of grassroots rural culture. In 2016, Zhang Yiming, the founder of the company that makes Jinri Toutiao (as well as the popular short-video app TikTok, known in China as Douyin), told Caijing, “I don’t think it’s a problem to be labeled ‘vulgar.’ The magazines you read at the airport are different from the magazines at the train station, but some people will denigrate  [lower-class train station reading] in order to prove that they are elegant.” For Professor Wu at East China Normal University, the conversation around vulgarity signifies a deeper issue about the representation of rural life. “Technically speaking, mass media should already be giving this type of [rural] mass culture an opportunity to express itself,” Wu says. “But it’s also a fact that this culture doesn’t meet the standard for the type of culture that [the authorities feel] Chinese media is supposed to promote.” Long neglected by official media, rural residents are creating their own media online, regardless of whether it aligns with the public image that the government hopes to cultivate. To Wu, there will always be a market for the so-called “low end” of goods and media consumption, but this reflects a real divide in society under the current “socialist market” economy, rather than any conscious effort to provoke cultural conflict. Rural social media help “reinforce or even restore the bonds of community, and in-group and out-group relations within the villages.” They also expose the gaps in the official narrative of upward mobility, and function as a kind of implicit critique of the notion that anyone can succeed in the new Chinese economy—which may help explain why they have triggered a heavy-handed government response.


Prompt: Better Products, Better People Counterfeit goods on e-commerce platforms and vulgar content on media apps may seem like distinct controversies. But from the government’s perspective, they are closely connected. Ever since market reforms began in 1978, and the focus shifted toward globalization and economic liberalization, discussions in official media about improving product quality—or pinzhi (品质)—began to happen alongside discussions about improving suzhi (素质), an ambiguous term that encompasses a citizen’s intellectual and moral qualities. Rural Chinese are often seen as particularly in need of improved suzhi, and the government has launched several initiatives toward that end.

Response: One example is the “National Training Plan for Migrant Workers,” an ambitious policy to improve the suzhi of China’s rural-to-urban migrants through a mix of state-run job-training programs and media campaigns at the provincial and municipal levels. The goal was to encourage migrant workers to improve their manners, develop useful skills, and adopt an enterprising attitude to compete in the market economy in the absence of social benefits. Chengdu’s training program, for example, had lessons on municipal hygiene and traffic rules, as well as the “right” ways of sitting, walking, and even dressing for migrant ”new urbanites.” A 2009 program in the town of Zhangpu, Jiangsu Province, included lectures on labor law and job-search etiquette, as well as skills training in the accounting, security guard, and landscaping professions.


Prompt: Vulgar content that goes viral on platforms like Kwai threatens to undermine suzhi, then, just as counterfeit goods that circulate through platforms like PDD threaten to undermine pinzhi. In both cases, however, a top-down order isn’t enough for the countryside to upgrade its lifestyle. Counterfeit goods, and “low-quality” content, continue to flow.

Response: “Other men can go home and watch their wives. I watch my phone,” Zhu Hongfu, a laborer from Zhejiang province, baldly admits to me. A bachelor now in his fifties, Zhu is among the three million “surplus men” in China, many from rural or working-class backgrounds who, as a result of China’s skewed gender ratio and their own financial position, may never find a partner to marry. Besides using WeChat to keep up with friends, he says, his phone serves just two purposes: playing an online card game called Double Buckle, and browsing videos of attractive women.


Prompt: “I’ll stop when I get married,” he jokes. His colleague from nearby overhears him, and shouts: “Then we may have to wait a long time!” Open the app. Watch a fifteen-second video. Double tap for more videos. Watch those. Tap. Make a fifteen-second video. Touch it up. Post it. More than 500 million monthly active users of TikTok perform this cycle countless times a day, as they create and share short videos on one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.  TikTok, also known as Douyin (抖音) in China, is a social video app made by the Chinese company Bytedance. Since its release in 2016, it has become phenomenally successful. By the spring of 2018 it had become the most popular iOS app worldwide, with more than 45 million downloads over the first quarter of 2018 in the App Store, surpassing Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. And in late 2018, after a $3 billion funding round led by SoftBank boosted its valuation to $75 billion, Bytedance became the world’s biggest privately held startup.

Response: Yet as TikTok continues to grow globally, boasting more users around the world than Twitter or Snapchat, its biggest impact back home in China is where you might least expect it: the countryside. The real story of TikTok and platforms like it isn’t in the booming megacities, but in the rural villages. The consequences for the future of Chinese society, and the future of Chinese tech, are immense.  Country Living Platforms like TikTok have played a central role in bringing inexperienced users from rural communities online. Perhaps the most important reason is the fact that they use video rather than text. Compared to text, video content is much easier to comprehend for rural users, who are likely to have lower literacy rates, less formal education, and less experience with the internet.


Prompt: As part of my fieldwork, I interviewed a middle-aged female internet user in rural China who has only received a primary-school-level education. She prefers to watch cooking tutorial videos instead of reading descriptions of recipes, both because video tutorials are more convenient to follow while cooking and because she finds watching video easier than reading.

Response: For many rural users, in fact, online video has lowered the education and literacy barriers that had previously prevented them from participating in typical internet activities, such as reading news articles. They can now watch news videos, often clips from local TV news broadcasts that are shared on social media. They can also join the lively conversations that spring up around these videos, as users from the same rural community interact with one another in the comments section.


Prompt: Shun, sixty years old, used to work as the secretary of the Communist Party branch committee of a village in Henan province. He only recently became an active user of WeChat, a popular messaging and social-media app, after it began to offer more video content. Due to his lack of formal education, Shun says that he finds “watching short videos on the news posted by young people a more efficient way of information-seeking than reading long articles.” He belongs to a WeChat group chat for members of his village and, having silently followed the conversation for more than a year, he now shares videos that he finds informative with young villagers, hoping to connect with the new generation.

Response: Online video also offers an essential source of information for acquiring new skills, especially for female villagers who are learning how to knit, dance, and cook. Feng, a forty-three-year-old housewife, has become the center of her social circle in her village by introducing group dancing techniques to her girlfriends. Feng has fewer than three years of formal schooling, but she followed tutorial videos on a popular mobile app called “Tangdou Group Dancing App.” Feng discovered these videos because of a recommendation algorithm. Video apps implement sophisticated tools to tailor personalized content for their users, and this is often how inexperienced internet users in rural China find content. The algorithm-driven recommendation systems are frequently mentioned by interviewees in my fieldwork in Henan Province, a less developed area in the central part of the country. They consider recommendations an easier and more intuitive way to discover new videos than search engines such as Baidu, which require some experience to know how to use effectively.


Prompt: Content Creators Rural users aren’t just consuming video, however. They are also creating it. To help users make videos, apps like TikTok have embedded tools such as stickers, filters, transitions effects, and background music. These tools enable users with no special training to make well-produced videos relatively quickly. The videos have to be short: just like Twitter, where users are required to convey messages concisely in less than 280 characters, apps like TikTok only allow short videos—on TikTok, the limit is fifteen seconds—so users are encouraged to focus on the most attention-catching moments.

Response: A vast online ecosystem of rural video has emerged as a result, as users document their everyday lives. They make videos about how they farm crops, raise animals, and participate in the social life of the village. Such content is widely popular among rural users, who get to see their own communities represented by actual members of those communities. Rural users are adapting the platforms to their own ends, telling their own story rather than having official media outlets tell their story for them. As one TikTok user in rural China told me, “Videos generated at a grassroots level and produced by ordinary rural users represent a more vivid picture of what everyday life is like in rural China.” These videos are also popular among rural users who must leave the countryside for work: they help migrant workers feel connected to their hometowns when working in the cities, offering daily entertainment that does not require too much of a time commitment.


Prompt: But rural users aren’t the only consumers of these videos. The platforms also enable urban users to see rural life in far more depth and detail—and in the process are helping to bridge the significant divide between the two worlds. This divide has grown dramatically since the country began opening up in the 1970s. Industrialization, urbanization, and modernization have pushed rural and urban China in two very different directions, primarily due to economic policies of the central government that favor urban areas and the unequal distribution of infrastructure and wealth that has resulted.

Response: Moreover, while migrant workers from rural China have fuelled economic growth in urban areas, the rigid hukou (“household registration”) system prevents them from becoming urban citizens and enjoying social benefits such as better pension funds, better healthcare, and better schools for their children. In recent years, many young migrants have returned to their towns and villages. They have brought the basic technology skills they learned in the cities back with them, and often put them to use in an entrepreneurial capacity: for instance, by starting businesses and then reaching urban customers with e-commerce websites, mobile social media, and short-video platforms. This has produced even more online encounters across the rural-urban divide.


Prompt: Sometimes, however, such encounters have led to controversy. In 2016, just as short-video platforms were starting to appear, a public account on WeChat named “Doctor X” wrote a post criticizing rural users for the “vulgarity” of their videos. The author argued that rural users were seeking attention by showing particularly impoverished households or by performing dangerous stunts like eating glass or raw meat. If their content became popular, the users could then cash in by promoting ads or receiving gifts from fans. The videos reflected poorly on Chinese rural life, the author warned, and underscored the unbridgeable gap between the countryside and the cities.

Response: Similarly, the official news has criticized short-video platforms for not designing “socially accountable algorithms,” and has called for them to take responsibility for feeding higher-quality content to users. In January 2019, the China Netcasting Services Association, a national industry body, published a set of guidelines on short-video platforms, which forbid the publication of 100 topics that are politically sensitive or considered “immoral” or “unhealthy.” It also required platforms to review content before it goes live, which would require hiring more moderators. Companies like Bytedance already employ thousands of moderators to review the content on their platforms, ensuring it remains within acceptable parameters. But the China Netcasting Services Association wants them to do more: “In theory, the number of reviewers should be above one a thousandth of the number of videos published on the platform per day.” Yet for all the controversy around short-video platforms, there is ample evidence that they also create opportunities for mutual understanding and exchange across the urban-rural divide. For example, the Huanong Brothers are two young men from the countryside who have become some of the most popular social-media influencers in China in 2018. After working in urban areas for a few years, they returned to their village and started a small business raising and selling bamboo rats, a type of rodent that’s used in local dishes in Jiangxi province. They document their everyday life of raising, cleaning, and cooking bamboo rats on Xigua Video, a platform also owned by Bytedance that allows longer videos than TikTok. The Huanong Brothers’ videos have gone viral on the Chinese internet, earning over 500 million views and 2 million followers. Their online success has also translated into offline income: in addition to earning advertising revenue on their videos, the Huanong Brothers have also sold an increasing number of pre-orders for their bamboo rats.


Prompt: As more urban and rural users use these platforms, and the number of videos from both sides increases exponentially, the two societies within China are getting to know one another’s way of life. The platforms can even provide an income stream to rural users, as demonstrated by the Huanong Brothers and by e-commerce entrepreneurs who use videos to promote the sale of agricultural products to urban areas. And while urban and rural audiences still have different preferences when it comes to content, rural videos can become popular among urban users nostalgic for what they perceive to be a simpler life closer to the natural environment. Online video platforms offer a site of encounter where two very different Chinas can meet.

Response: Going Global As the Chinese tech industry grows, its companies are increasingly looking beyond the domestic market to the international one. Here, Chinese video platforms have been uniquely successful. Apps like TikTok are also finding a large audience throughout the world. According to The Verge, “Bytedance is the first Chinese internet company with a significant, genuinely engaged following around the world.” It has opened offices in several countries, including Japan, Brazil, India, and the United States. It is also hiring speakers of more than a dozen languages, including Portuguese, Polish, Malay, and Arabic. Its American growth has been particularly intense: in the US, the iOS app has been downloaded and installed almost 80 million times. In October 2018, it was downloaded more than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. Meanwhile, TikTok’s smaller rival Kwai, known as Kuaishou in China, is also gaining ground overseas. In the spring of 2018, it ranked as the most downloaded iOS app in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the most downloaded mobile app in Vietnam and South Korea.


Prompt: As Chinese video platforms become more global, Chinese users are encountering more overseas content generated by international users. Similarly, international users are encountering more Chinese content by virtue of using Chinese platforms. It remains to be seen whether these platforms can bridge not only the rural-urban gap within China, but the divides between China and the rest of the world. The linguistic and cultural barriers are certainly higher, but the financial rewards are far greater. Bringing the Chinese countryside and the cities closer together may end up being a rehearsal for a far more ambitious act of ambassadorship.

Response: Graham is over six feet tall. He has a beaming smile, and the kind of charisma and confidence that is hard to ignore. He is an economist who recently moved to Hong Kong. Unwilling to relocate to Asia, his long-term girlfriend ended the relationship, which frustrated but also liberated Graham. He is now free to pursue a single life in Hong Kong as an expat.  In the dating scene of Hong Kong, heterosexual expat men like Graham enjoy a certain privilege but also a certain prey: Asian women. Graham’s thoughtfully crafted Bumble profile shows his acute awareness of this. It caters to those who might be intrigued by his knowledge of tea and Japanese and Chinese languages and calligraphies, or by his non-aggressive photos, such as one of him reading in a coffee shop—rather than photos of him working out in a gym, which is what most male users put in their profile.


Prompt: We started chatting and arranged to meet for drinks. “Meeting for drinks” is synonym for “you know what happens after a few drinks.” But when I told my friend about this economist who shared my enthusiasm for teas, she immediately asked whether his name was Graham. “Well, I know very few Western academics in Hong Kong who are single and knowledgeable about tea,” she said. It turns out that Graham is a colleague of hers, and they had just “met for drinks” recently, and it had indeed led to physical intimacy. I was both surprised and sorry. “I am so sorry. I had no idea.” My friend smiled. “Don’t worry about it. This is Hong Kong.”  A Point in Between Hong Kong has long been known for its transience. People who come don’t come to stay. As a financial center without political autonomy, it is a capitalist utopia for the global super-elite, full of opportunities for those who have no intention of settling. This quality of Hong Kong once prompted the literary scholar Ackbar Abbas to assert that the city has always been, and will perhaps always be, a port in the most literal sense—a doorway, a point in between. Hence it makes little sense for transients to invest anything major and permanent, emotions included.

Response: Against this backdrop, romance has always been strange. This strangeness is further amplified by factors such as a falling marriage rate due to high housing prices and long working hours, and a sense of uncertainty about the city’s future. Since the handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997, Hong Kong has been governed under the “one country, two systems” principle enshrined by Article 5 of the Basic Law, the city’s mini-constitution. While this arrangement isn’t set to expire until 2047, growing pressure from Beijing in recent years has constrained the city’s autonomy. In 2014, a set of reforms that gave Beijing greater control over local elections sparked the Umbrella Revolution, a massive street protest that shut down core parts of the city for more than a month.  Beijing’s influence has also shrunk the space for women’s self-determination. This space was never enormous: the patriarchal traditions of southern China, with their emphasis on family piety and male dominance, have long dominated Hong Kong. In the colonial era, these traditions were often embraced by Hongkongers as a form of opposition to British rule, and their power continued uninterrupted in the twentieth century. By contrast, in mainland China a wave of unrest during the 1910s and 1920s—the New Culture Movement, the May Fourth Movement—culminating in the Communist revolution of 1949 weakened the grip of old Confucian customs. The result is that traditional patriarchy is much better preserved in Hong Kong than in major mainland cities like Shanghai.


Prompt: But the patriarchal turn under Chinese president Xi Jinping has introduced a new element. As Chinese state policy increasingly promotes traditional gender roles, Hong Kong is feeling the effects. This is particularly evident in the growing focus on “sheng nv” 剩女, or “leftover women,” in Hong Kong. The term refers to unmarried women who are over twenty-five. Although the phrase originated in mainland China, it gained popularity in Hong Kong very quickly. In 2011, Bride Wannabes, a reality show featuring single women trying to find suitors with help from matchmaking companies, beauty salons, and dating gurus, became an overnight sensation. Its mission was to “solve the worsening situation of leftover women in Hong Kong.” In an attempt to make the show sound more cheerful, however, the producers changed the character that stands for “leftover” (剩) to “prosperity” (盛), with the same pronunciation.  The show stigmatizes singlehood and puts pressure on women to get married. It also feeds the growth of a lucrative matchmaking industry that capitalizes on women’s fears of becoming “leftover.” Matchmakers charge as much as HK $2,000 (US $255) for a first consultation, and women are sometimes charged much more than men—which is justified by the unbalanced female-to-male ratio, but which further strengthens the patriarchal power structure. Some matchmakers will even bluntly tell their female clients that once they reach the age of thirty, they will be charged more and put on a different list.  For women who are striving to lead a meaningful professional life, it is often difficult to find a partner. In such a gendered and capitalistic market, Hong Kong men value looks above other criteria, while women tend to pay attention to education, profession, and whether potential matches appear serious about wanting to commit—a dynamic that once again reproduces family-focused, male-dominant arrangements.

Response: Yet people in Hong Kong look for love as avidly as anyone—perhaps more avidly. “Hong Kong’s lonely hearts are among the world’s most desperate to find love,” says the South China Morning Post, citing data from the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel that shows Hong Kong users use it the most frequently of anyone. 66 percent of Hongkongers who have downloaded the app log on every day—the highest rate in the world.  For those who log into those apps regularly, the feeling of knowing there are a few good ones out there, if only in the form of glorified profiles, gives them some sense of comfort. Dating apps don’t just offer the opportunity to explore a pool of potentially interesting people, however. They also create a comfortable and safe distance between the user and their object of affection, and between such affections and oneself.


Prompt: Products and Commodities John is a barrister originally from England. He seemed interested in my research, and we talked about dating and living in Hong Kong. I told him that I was surprised to see that many of the app users were looking for potential clients for their own business, be it personal fitness or organic food.

Response: I had recently discovered this firsthand. On Bumble, I started to get tired of the question, “So what’re you looking for here?” So one day I abruptly answered, “I’m looking for love. And what are you looking for?” He replied, “I’m a yoga instructor. I’m looking for potential clients.” John laughed when I told him this. “Well, Bumble itself is a business. We are the products as well as the commodities.” The first night we spent together, something unusual happened, at least for Hong Kong, where personal space and personal time are priceless: he stayed. In the week that followed we kept in touch. One day I received a WhatsApp message from him: “I miss you.” But just as I was about to answer, the message appeared as “deleted.” It disappeared, literally, before it even appeared.


Prompt: And I never heard back from John again. Could you start off by introducing yourself and what do you do? I am a partner at Primitive Ventures where we do early-stage investment and interesting cryptocurrency stuff. Before that I was a partner INBlockchain, which is the largest crypto fund in China with a couple billion dollars under management, depending on the daily price of Bitcoin. I'm still a venture partner there but I focus full-time on Primitive.

Response: How did you get into this space and into the Chinese crypto space specifically? I got into Bitcoin fairly early on. I didn't buy very much of it because it was originally introduced to me by a friend who at the time was investing in a lot of weird stuff. He was really into weed stocks way back in the day—I think there was only one tradable stock in that sector at the time that was some company making a marijuana vending machine. It sounded totally ridiculous, but it became a proxy for Wall Street interest in marijuana.


Prompt: This friend told me about this thing called Bitcoin that he was really into. He described it as a form of digital money that you could actually hold, unlike PayPal balances which are really just notional numbers in a database and at the end of the day are completely under the control of Paypal. I went on to read the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper and was instantly fascinated, especially because back then there was this narrative that it was going to an uncensorable payment system. That just seemed really exciting. So I bought a very small amount of Bitcoin with cash from some guy at a cafe in Soma.

Response: I didn’t pay much more attention to the space until about 2015 or 2016, when there started to be a lot of interesting non-Bitcoin blockchain projects. Before that, it was basically Bitcoin and then a ton of scams. There was Megacoin and Feathercoin and all these things were just like... obvious scams. It didn't seem like it was going to be an industry so much as a ton of people trying to profit off of it by running their own hustle. But then it became apparent that there were some other uses for blockchain besides just Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin's the biggest, most interesting use-case, but there became a lot of other interesting smaller ones.


Prompt: For instance? The two things I think are most interesting are coins for payments which preserve privacy, and Handshake, a coin that creates a separate DNS namespace for websites. On the privacy-coins, I think we’re on the verge of an explosive battle between Facebook, who have said they’re doing a coin that will probably be launched in Whatsapp, Telegram, who raised over one billion dollars to create a coin that can be used within their messaging app, and Signal, who are working to integrate a privacy-preserving coin called Mobilecoin. The messaging apps are a natural place for payments to occur, something which I became religiously convinced of after living in China for a while and using WeChat for absolutely everything. But WeChat, Paypal, Venmo, etc, are basically panoptic surveillance systems for governments, and if that’s the vision of digital payments we end up with, we’re in a pretty horrifying 1984-esque society that seems hard to get out of. Of the three messager-coins, I’m probably most excited about Mobilecoin/Signal because of Signal’s impeccable reputation for serious privacy and security--a coin by Facebook has serious trust issues to overcome.  Handshake, the other project I’m really excited about, uses a blockchain to auction off and then keep track of a bunch of new domain names. So for example you could bid on “.mango” and then have xiaowei.mango as your blog. Besides the obvious fun of having a bunch of new names to play around with, and not having to wait on a slow-moving bureaucracy to approve new TLDs, Handshake domains have the added advantage of being basically unseizable, so you can use them to host whatever content you want and not be worried that the government or a registrar will decide to stop you.  So when you started seeing more interesting non-Bitcoin projects, what did you do next? I formed a startup with with my friend Ben Yu to do a live-streaming platform using blockchain for micropayments. The inspiration for this was that when I was in college in China, I saw these live-streaming platforms where people were making huge amounts of money, but the platform took a 50 percent cut.

Response: I asked some friends in Beijing if they could introduce me to any Chinese investors that were interested in investing in blockchain ideas. At the time there were not very many. One friend mentioned that he knew the most famous Bitcoin blogger in China, Xiao Lai Li, and offered to introduce me to him; if he liked my project he might tell his investor friends about it. I tried to set up a meeting with this guy. He was not around but introduced me to his partner, Lao Mao. I ended up meeting with Lao Mao in this beautiful coworking space, and he showed up in a new Porsche. In my mind I was like, “Huh, being a blogger is really lucrative in China.”  We ended up getting along. He was really smart, and we had the same outlook on the future of the space. At the end of it, he said that he was interested in investing in what we were doing. I was surprised because I didn’t know they invested. When I asked about it, he gave me this weird look and said, "Yeah, we run this fund called INBlockchain. It's a fairly large fund in China." When I got home and read up on them, I found out they had the biggest Bitcoin holdings of anyone in China, maybe the world. I'm glad I went into the meeting feeling low-stress, thinking I was just going to talk to a blogger—it probably made the pitch a lot better.


Prompt: They ended up inviting me to this crazy meeting in Shanghai that they were having. INBlockchain was running the biggest crypto exchange in China at the time, called Yunbi. They took the hundred biggest Yunbi customers and all their portfolio companies to a secret summit at the Park Hyatt in Shanghai. They also asked if we wanted to adjourn afterwards to a secret boat meeting, and I was like, “Definitely.” Ben and I thought, well, it’ll be expensive to fly back to China and we don’t have any funding, but let’s do it. Then when we got home, they had already bought us tickets and reserved a room at the Hyatt. My cofounder and I were kind of stunned.

Response: When we got to the meeting, I gave the pitch for Stream, the project we were working on. I gave it in Chinese, which totally freaked everyone out. My partner Ben is Chinese-American, but he doesn't speak Mandarin very well. It was funny; I was this white kid on stage giving our pitch in Chinese, and my Chinese partner was putting on headphones to hear the English translation. All the people around him are looking at him like, "What is wrong with you?" I gave the pitch and people got excited about it and we ended up moving forward with it. I started helping Xiao Lai and Lao Mao with some of the platform stuff they were doing, and helped them localize their initial coin offering (ICO) platform to the US. I also sent over some suggestions for Yunbi and gave some advice on some of their companies. Eventually Xiaolai proposed that I come onboard as a partner and invest with them, rather than just run one of their startups.


Prompt: I ended up taking him up on the offer, since I liked that group of people so much. They're all just really conscientious, smart people. Before I left, we figured out some people that could replace us at that startup, and I officially joined INBlockchain. One of the things I noticed with your newsletter is that you actually take things for a test drive, like spinning up a Handshake node. Would you say that’s rare for an investor? Yes, and it blows my mind. When you invest in something, you’re putting such a huge amount of money in it. You would imagine that part of your due diligence would be to go and actually use the thing.  But no! Many of these funds have no real-world interaction with the technology they’re investing in. So they often have these bizarre opinions about what it does. In my mind I would be wondering, “How can you actually believe that?” And the answer is that they have literally never used the technology.

Response: The technical barrier is really not that high. I'm far from a programmer—I can write some vim scripts and stuff—but even I can spin up a Handshake node and make some bids, and get a feel for how it actually works, and get a sense for whether it is so hard that no one is ever going to use it, or if it is right on the brink of being usable. I think that insight is valuable, and it's not hard to get. So it blows my mind that so few investors in the space actually use the stuff.


Prompt: Unevenly Distributed Futures  From your experience, do you feel like the Chinese crypto scene is pretty globalized, or is there “crypto with Chinese characteristics”? I feel very adamantly that crypto is a global phenomenon, and that there's no such thing as Chinese Ethereum or Korean Bitcoin or whatever—I think that’s ridiculous. However, from an investment perspective, there are definitely localized scenes. I don't think highly of most of the Chinese crypto projects, but the Chinese crypto infrastructure is way better than the US. If you look at the Chinese exchanges like Yunbi, Binance, Huobi, OKEx, they're just killing it. There is just no comparison to the US exchanges.  It’s funny: Mike Moritz, who is a partner at Sequoia, wrote an article speaking favorably about the crazy pace of Chinese startup culture and got crucified for it. People thought he was racist and was glorifying overwork. But all of my Chinese friends who read that article were like, “Right on, that’s 100 percent accurate.” The culture at these Chinese startups is incredibly high-paced and it makes Silicon Valley look relaxed in comparison. To my mind, that’s why they're dominating. As someone who invests in crypto infrastructure, my perspective is that if there's a Chinese company and a US company who are both working in the same niche, the Chinese company is just going to wreck it.

Response: What is the average profile of a crypto trader or buyer in China? It's middle to upper class, both male and female. There are lots of people from business school, people with both finance and tech backgrounds. One thing I found interesting is that people in China understood Bitcoin on a more intuitive level very quickly, whereas in the US, people's reactions were way slower.


Prompt: Similar to the five stages of grief, you can see the five stages of Bitcoin denialism: first people think it’s a toy, then they think it’s a scam, then eventually they come to the conclusion that it’s a useful thing. Whereas in China, it seemed like people skipped through a lot of that—they just immediately got it.

Response: And their reaction, which I think is the correct reaction, was, “I'm not going to put my life savings in this right now, but I'm going buy a little bit in case this becomes a thing.” I think owning something like 0.87 Bitcoin puts you in the top 1 percent of Bitcoin holders. A very small amount of Bitcoin hedges the risk that Bitcoin becomes the world currency. Chinese people intuitively got that, whereas in America, people didn’t. I would tell Americans over and over again, just buy a thousand bucks of Bitcoin and forget about it. If it loses all of its value, whatever. Just have that hedge.


Prompt: Yeah, I remember even my aunt who is a typical southern Chinese housewife was super into crypto. She talked about it in terms of diversifying, and it made a lot of sense to me. Totally. They’re willing to make small bets on risky things. I think China also has some amount of “neophilia” that contributes to it. People in China are excited about new technology. Even older people in China use WeChat Pay for mobile payments, whereas in the US there's a stronger Luddite strain in our culture. I have a friend who was born in China and moved to the US when she was really young. When I talk to her, she’s like, “The reason I want to go back to China to work is that no one ever goes to the US and thinks, ‘I felt like I was in the future.’” Proof of Work How much of the discussion about crypto in the US makes its way to China? There's a robust flow of translated articles about crypto from English to Chinese, so the Chinese scene is relatively in sync with the US one. If people start thinking about something in the US, within a week or two it will get translated into Chinese and there will be a lot of discussion about it.

Response: Do you feel like the converse is also true, that the English-speaking scene in the US is synced up with the Chinese one? No, that direction is very poor. We occasionally try to help with that a bit, but to be honest, it's kind of an advantage for us that most US funds have such a bad understanding of China. I almost have an incentive to not translate much of what’s being discussed, because it’s good for me that we get it and they don’t.