by Xiaowei Wang
The lack of hard currency in Dinglou indicates that traditional banks have been replaced. Few transactions in the village involve actual cash—instead, mobile payment is the easiest way to buy sesame oil or wholesale costumes. This is done entirely through Alipay. Alipay has become a financial institution contained in a mobile device. All across China, mobile payment has replaced cash. For sellers like Ren, Alipay has solved the issue of nervously checking bank accounts every day after an order ships.
Alipay functions as a sophisticated escrow account. A buyer can send money to a seller via Alipay and Alipay holds the money. The platform releases the money to the seller once the buyer indicates he or she has received the goods. Sending secret money to your parents while avoiding the ire of your spouse can now be done through Alipay. Loans can also be taken out through Alipay, which is popular among younger generations and bemoaned as the downfall of Chinese society by older generations. Alipay has become a pivotal part of rural economic infrastructure, in areas where traditional physical banking has been inconvenient for many villagers like Ren Qingsheng.
In 2019, Alipay had seven hundred million users, with nearly two hundred million transactions a day. It also has a credit-scoring system, Sesame Credit, for Alipay loans, which is often confused with a national-credit scoring system. But most important of all, Alipay solved the problem of trust between buyers and sellers—a critical issue in “platform businesses” and a management idea that originated in Japan in the 1990s, from business gurus such as Jiro Kokuryo and Imai Kenichi.
Alipay has even more ambitious plans. At Ant Financial, Alibaba’s sister firm that now owns Alipay, entire branches of the company are devoted to rural finance. At one talk I attended in Guangzhou, Zheng Jia, the deputy general manager of Ant Financial’s rural finance department, pointed to an elaborate diagram showing how Alipay will plug into rural economies. Alibaba’s ET Agricultural Brain will help farmers generate greater income. Increased income will facilitate the purchasing of more farming equipment, off Alibaba’s many other e-commerce platforms. Jia showed an elaborate computer vision project that is already being piloted in Henan Province. Farmers need access to loans, Jia said. But they typically have types of collateral that are different from those of city people. A farmer’s assets might be pigs or chickens. As a result, Ant Financial is setting up cameras on farms that can display a farmer’s assets in real time to help assess credit scores and risk in lending scenarios. Such data can also be used by ET Agricultural Brain to help farmers with the animal-raising process. With this risk-assessment camera in place, farmers can then use Alipay to apply for loans. Already, a chicken farmer in Lankao County, Henan, has used this complex Bio-Inventory of Assets System to apply for RMB 200,000 in loans on Alipay.
Will these platforms continue to run unfettered and unregulated? A lawyer I talk to, who has worked at places like the China Food and Drug Administration, points to very public, visible platform safety incidents that indicate regulation will happen. He gives examples: people getting sick from food purchased off Taobao, rural citizens getting scammed into bankruptcy by peer-to-peer lending platforms, and the Didi Chuxing incident in 2018, where a driver raped and killed a passenger. The public outcry in response to these incidents led swiftly to immediate changes to the platform. The government is happy to intervene, even in an age where it has been more and more open to letting private companies act first, and regulating only later.
8.
In 2001, after the September 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush took to television to deliver an important message: Above all, stay calm, go on with your daily life, and keep shopping. Fifteen years later, after the election of President Trump, some activists on the left had a similar message: Vote with your wallet. There was not much you could do about the administration in power, but what you could do was abstain from buying certain brands.
Shopping has made consumption the site of political action rather than the enemy of it. Although many of us have jobs that keep us occupied, the real work we do these days is shopping, and especially shopping online. Economists across the world make it clear that we are in a consumer-driven economy. Shopping is an ecstasy-inducing act, a brief tease that allows us to brush up against the life we desire, that we feel like we deserve. So much exists in the service of shopping, one of the world’s biggest religions. Modern corporate social media is born out of shopping—it fills our screens, bits of news and personal announcements interspersed with ads, enrapturing us into a ludic loop. Machine-learning algorithms hum along to recommend better items. Entire companies like Facebook and Tencent derive vast profits from ads, collecting and monetizing data to sell better ads. Smaller platforms scheme on how to collect data to resell for marketers.
There is no end to shopping, for Dinglou or for us in the United States. Dinglou was China’s first Taobao village, but thousands more like it exist, making everything from wooden toys to clothing, candy, and computer fans. These items end up not only in China but abroad. While there are casualties of the trade war between the United States and China, with titans of globalization such as Walmart under threat, these smaller e-commerce manufacturing businesses in China are thriving in the long tail of shopping.
Sellers on Amazon, independent drop-shippers, and platforms like Wish.com use the power of AliExpress to tap into these small manufacturers throughout China, in places like Dinglou. Curated Instagram campaigns, featuring prominent influencers, are launched by a vast landscape of small, new “lifestyle brands”—companies based outside China that source directly from AliExpress. Manufacturers on AliExpress also move with lightning speed in customizing designs. Many crowdfunded products made on Kickstarter are produced by these small manufacturers as well. Wish.com, with headquarters based in Menlo Park, is a peculiar version of Amazon with half a billion users. It is a drop-shipper, sourcing from AliExpress, but its customer base is in the Midwest, Texas, and Florida. Its diverse users range from those who frequent flea markets and swap meets to racists who post on 4chan about the “cheap chink gear” available.
One of my favorite newsletters, The Strategist (a weekly dispatch of shopping deals from New York magazine), recommends that I buy the very hyped Orolay down coat, a “viral” coat exclusively available on Amazon.com with more than seven thousand reviews. Priced at US$130, and with a four-star rating, it seems like a good deal. Man Repeller, a well-known fashion blog, agrees, saying the coat has “murky origins” but that it recommends the 90 percent down jacket. The murky origin, it turns out, is rural China. Jiaxing county, Zhejiang to be precise, where locals work for Orolay, churning out these down jackets and taking advantage of Amazon’s new measures that make it easy for overseas businesses to sell on the site.
Matilda, the founder of Bits x Bites, had put it this way: If big companies like Nabisco symbolized the nineties, hundreds of smaller, fragmented companies will dominate the future, catering to a continuum of different tastes and experiences. And this landscape of smaller companies is what some people see as part of “the New Retail.” This New Retail will be powered by the edges of manufacturing, in places like Dinglou.
Shopping is powerful. It can swiftly accommodate broad cultural shifts, responding to the myriad subcultures and identities in the internet age. A scan through Taobao, Etsy, Instagram, and Xiaohongshu (the Chinese version of Instagram) shows enticing products in ads that fit almost any identity that you can think of.
Ads mesmerize us by instilling a “cruel optimism,” a relation that the theorist Lauren Berlant describes as when “the object that you thought would bring happiness becomes an object that deteriorates the conditions for happiness. But its presence represents the possibility of happiness as such.”2 An example she gives is the dream of “the good life,” where the good life eludes most of us, given the current economic reality we live in, as many of us live paycheck to paycheck. Yet we chase after this dream, some of us styling ourselves and our homes to reflect the life we aspire to, while plunging ourselves into
debt, losing relationships to overworking. This isn’t just in the United States—it’s in China too, where millennials have nearly doubled the country’s household debt through aspirational spending.3
Unlike religion though, shopping traverses your innermost wishes, requiring your faith and desire, only to leave you stranded without community or security. Luckily, there is always a beautiful ad around the corner, waiting for you, to ignite that faith, that longing and attachment.
Taobao is technically a free platform, but it makes money from sellers buying ads. When I spoke to Ren, he pragmatically likened it to a form of digital rent: it’s more expensive to run a store in a busy part of town with better foot traffic.
A few blocks down from Ren’s house, I stop at a shoe shop. It’s unavoidable—there’s an alarmingly strong scent of plastic emanating from the doorway. The owner of this shoe store disagrees with Ren. Not only has the drive for ads gotten worse, but Taobao launched seller livestreaming, a version of an online home-shopping network. This takes additional time and resources from sellers. These ads are different from a form of rent—livestream requires that the seller offer something beyond the product itself, something akin to aura or alluring aspiration. Standing in the shop, I’m dizzy from the fumes, tired of Dinglou’s aura. The owner seems to be tired as well.
“Alibaba sucks us dry,” he says. “It sucks the blood out of us, and it will suck the blood out of this village. As sellers, all our money is kept in Alipay because that’s how buyers send money. At the drop of a pin they can demand a refund, and because of the escrow service, the money gets sent back to them, even if I’ve shipped the order already. Or maybe they don’t like the material, they think it’s cheap. But we have to keep on making worse-quality stuff. How are we supposed to keep prices low and also compete with others? The government thinks it’s great and keeps doing things like building roads, putting in broadband. And Alibaba uses all this infrastructure for free, relies on us to make decisions on lowering the quality of goods. But what happens next? There’s only so much cutting corners we can do. There’s only so many ads we can buy, lies about the products we can say. What happens when this system fails?”
9.
As the sun sets in Dinglou, people begin to set up stalls for the night market, rolling out metal carts and tiny stools. This night market happens every ninth day, according to the traditional lunar Chinese calendar that is widely used in rural China, as opposed to the urban Gregorian calendar. This lunar calendar is based on agricultural planting seasons, carving time into unequal, inconsistent slivers.
Like any cult, shopping is difficult to extricate oneself from. I love shopping. I am unashamed. Even when I’m away from home, staying in Dinglou, I know that packages might be piling up at my door. I buy wrapping paper from Amazon, envelopes, rolls of tape, the perfect summer cooler for storing seltzer, a set of spice jars. They are all generic items by brands I’ve never heard of, items that can be easily found on Alibaba or AliExpress. I know I pay a slight premium by purchasing via the sellers on Amazon who source from Alibaba. Sometimes I buy handmade goods from Etsy, lovely items but still made out of fabric manufactured in southern China.
Online shopping is a meditative act for me, as I read reviews, peruse blogs, and contemplate the potential of my life with this new product. I page through Xiaohongshu and Instagram; I savor ads for their aesthetics as much as their aspiration. There are two consumerist logics prevalent in my circle of left-leaning urbanites. Political action in shopping is positioned as either refusing to purchase or purchasing from brands that you support. It’s a parallel I see in approaches to managing relations to social media: either log off entirely or switch to a different network. And while it’s easy to acknowledge that I don’t need a Snow White costume, it’s harder to say I wouldn’t be slightly happier with a modernist glass carafe or a plastic-free bamboo toothbrush. At least, happier for a few moments.
Refusal and purchasing to support are both cruel optimism, providing a false sense of control. It’s that same sense of control that makes shopping so pleasurable. In a world that is so interconnected, with problems at a scale I cannot comprehend—climate change, plastics in the ocean, e-waste, political instability from globalization—the trick of shopping is that it makes me feel like I am doing something about those problems. I am asserting my agency, this agency that I am promised as an American. My small choice to either buy or not buy exerts control over the world as I want to see it—as I imagine it, maybe more eco-friendly, more sustainable.
But what if I didn’t need to assert control at all? What would it mean to define my daily life without any of the packages that arrive at my doorstep, to invent a life that required no material possessions? And while the thought of giving up control sounds nice, in the meantime, I scroll, click, read, add to cart. Somewhere, not in Dinglou but likely in another village in China, a nice family is making me a wooden toothbrush with removable heads that will arrive at my door on a subscription basis. It’s eco-friendly.
In 2018, Alibaba announced plans to export the Taobao village model. The World Bank is interested in this model for other places in the world, including countries like South Africa. One former counsel for Alibaba tells me that Jack Ma envisioned the Electronic World Trade Organization (eWTO), before counsel advised him to change the name. It’s now called the Electronic World Trade Platform, or eWTP. The eWTP has become part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. As of 2018, three eWTP outposts had been set up: in Malaysia, Rwanda, and South Africa. The Alibaba Research Institute’s rural researchers continue to monitor manufacturing costs throughout the Chinese countryside as well as in the United States, citing the extensive investment Chinese companies are now undertaking in revitalizing rural American towns.
Before I left his shop, the disgruntled shoe manufacturer kept saying, “It’s all a scam.” His words had the solemnity of a mantra.
How to Eat the World
“Software is eating the world,” declared Marc Andreessen in 2011, and in a sense, he was right. In a time of crisis, software has increasingly become the answer to help us build and support more efficient systems. The software industry has also been responsible for enormous inequality by accelerating other industries like rare earth mining and gig work. While software may be eating the world, this is not inevitable. The promise of software and technology is that they help solve the problems we face right now, without addressing how those problems began—problems including the uneven distribution of basic resources like food. This recipe imagines a world where we have continued using technology simply to solve problems, without taking time to think about the maintenance and care of what we have in front of us.
Ingredients for Wrappers
glutinous rice flour | 45 g
rice flour (water-milled, Thai variety) | 45 g
wheat starch | 20 g
powdered sugar | 30 g
coconut milk | 130 ml
vegetable oil | 18 g
glutinous rice flour for covering surfaces and kneading
Ingredients for Filling
butter | 45 g
moon-maize meal | 40 g, may substitute for regular cornmeal
powdered cream | 40 g, may substitute with powdered milk
powdered sugar | 30 g, may add 5 g more for a sweeter filling
eggs | 2 large
Tools
heat-proof spatula
steamer
metal dish or bowl that fits inside the steamer
large metal bowl | for making the filling
mold | for shaping the mooncakes; this can be as simple as a muffin tin, or, if you wish, you may purchase a more complex decorative mold online
These delicate “ice skin” mooncakes have wrappers made of glutinous rice flour instead of the traditional wheat flour, making it a delicious, southern-style Chinese treat. They are a favorite for the mid-autumn festival.
The filling of these mooncakes is a moon-maize custard, a custard with depth that complements the
traditional glutinous rice wrappers perfectly. In 2018, the first experiments by the China Lunar Exploration Program’s Chang’e 4 moon lander established a self-contained ecosystem for agriculture on the moon. It was the first time any biological matter grew on the moon.4 The next missions, Chang’e 5 and 6, advanced moon agriculture. Moon-maize seed cultivars were quickly developed by the company Syngenta, and were specially engineered to withstand lowered gravitational fields and less water.
While moon living hasn’t taken off as predicted in the past few years, the popularity of moon-grown foods has soared. As fires, pollution, and climate change worsened, farming on earth produced increasingly low-quality, low-nutrition foods, including some vegetables tainted with cadmium or lead. Automated farming on the moon took off, in response to upper-middle-class consumer demand. For those who can afford it, moon-cultivated foods are not only higher in nutrients but also far healthier. Studies have shown that the average lifespan of someone eating earth-cultivated foods is about fifty years, while those eating moon-cultivated food since birth can live up to a hundred years on average.
Gourmands also insist that the moon’s terroir, the special moon-maize cultivar, coupled with the unique gravitational field of the moon, give a complex, hearty aroma to moon-farmed foods. Moon maize is not just a specialty crop, however. Currently, private farming companies are doing research in using small, cost-effective UAVs (unmanned autonomous vehicles) for sowing and harvesting, so that everyone on earth can access moon-farmed food.
For this recipe, we highly suggest using the “Lora” strain, as it is organically grown and combines the best of heritage maize with the sweetness of modern corn. While these moon-maize mooncakes fetch a hefty price at Hema, you can make them at home for a fraction of the cost.