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Society for East Asian Anthropology

American Anthropological Association

You are here: Home / Archives for Yi Zhou

Culture and Mind in Moral Development in China

July 14, 2018 by Yi Zhou

Society for East Asian Anthropology

Jing Xu

June 27, 2018

Book Cover. Jing Xu

Why don’t Chinese socializers want their children to be compassionate and altruistic, or, at least, not too much? Why don’t young children share things in an egalitarian fashion, despite being told to do so by teachers and parents? Do these singleton children take for granted that everything belongs to them, or do they learn to negotiate ownership disputes and establish fairness rules? Are these children self-centered “little emperors” or are they well-disciplined students? My book, The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool, examines these and other puzzling questions I encountered during my fieldwork in Shanghai, from 2011 to 2012.

The book is inspired by a larger theoretical adventure of bridging anthropology and psychology in understanding fundamental questions facing humanity: How do we become moral beings? How do culture and mind intersect in the emergence of morality? First, while the emerging anthropology of morality and ethics is saturating nearly all social contexts, how children learn and acquire morality in their early years is an understudied direction in this field. Past anthropological studies on children’s diverse socialization experiences, however informative they are, have yet to figure into today’s mainstream anthropological discourses on morality. Moreover, exciting new discoveries on the emergence of morality in early childhood have inspired debates across biological, psychological, and social sciences (one can get a glimpse of its significance, by surveying top journal publications or mainstream media coverage), but this line of research is confined to experimental methods on mostly “WEIRD” populations (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic), without attending to children’s everyday socio-moral experience.

Author’s son, also a student in the preschool. Jing Xu

Driven by this theoretical ambition, I was especially fascinated by the case of China, where the relationship between children and moral norms—a topic that has concerned a previous generation of sinological anthropologists—deserves new ethnographic research, as longstanding Chinese moral education traditions are complicated by profound social transformations in contemporary China. Chinese academic traditions take zuo ren—moral cultivation—as the ultimate goal of learning, and education is seen as a crucial element in the edification of a better society. However, there is a widespread perception that China is in the midst of moral decay. Furthermore, the new generation of singleton children in urban China have distinctive moral experiences, different from those of previous generations or in other cultures.

Through the case of a middle-class private preschool (ages 2–6) community in Shanghai, my book aims to answer this central question: how do Chinese children, born under the one-child policy, alternately seen as China’s greatest hope and derided as self-centered “little emperors,” navigate their social world and developing their moral senses, at the height of a widely perceived “moral crisis” in China?

A unique feature of this book is the creative combination of anthropological and psychological theories and methods. For example, integrating psychological experiments into ethnographic fieldwork, I discovered the tension between the ideology of egalitarian sharing promoted by educators and children’s practice of sharing for strategic favors; I then illustrated the joint influence of adults’ guanxi practices and children’s nascent psychological dispositions for mutualistic cooperation on such sharing behavior. My book further brings together fine-grained analysis of social interactions among children, educators, and caregivers; questionnaire survey on child-rearing beliefs and practices; and salient cultural discourses and moral events in the broader society. For example, in the broader context of “soul-searching” in contemporary China, such as the discussion of the death of toddler girl Xiao Yueyue, I explored how socialization processes tune and twist children’s nascent empathy, thus creating a tension between cultivating empathy in the familiar school environment and suppressing empathy in the “dangerous” real world.

My book demonstrates that parents and educators are caught up in profound quandaries in moral education, as they live with extraordinary aspirations of children’s future success in an increasingly competitive environment, and tremendous anxieties about raising a moral child—their “only hope.” The heightened tension between cultivating morality and securing future success, and the proliferation of negotiating contradictory moral visions and childrearing values, doubtlessly, have profound impacts on child development, and will ultimately shape the future of China.

Moreover, it places young children at the center of analysis; reveals how cultural experience and psychological mechanisms together shape children’s moral development in multiple domains, including empathy and altruism, equality and strategic favor, fairness and ownership; and contextualizes such development in everyday socialization and disciplinary (guanjiao) practices. Although childhood is a prominent theme in the anthropology of China, the voices and experiences of young children themselves, especially those before elementary school age, are nonetheless obscured, for theoretical and methodological reasons I have alluded to. My book highlights children’s own agency and creativity: for example, I examined how some singleton children aptly updated their ownership heuristic from “everything is mine” to the first-possessor bias and strategically used ownership and fairness rules in navigate property disputes. In sum, they can proudly function as the center of universe at home, while also quickly adapting to the collective life at school and strive to become good students in teachers’ eyes. Thus my book presents how children construct their own moral universe that differs from both adult ideals (e.g., of returning to traditional “Chinese” values) and adult fantasies (of essentially selfish “little emperors”).

A child looking to the future. Jing Xu

Ultimately, the story of one community speaks to fundamental issues facing all human societies: the concern for cultivating moral personhood, the tension between cooperation and competition, and the role of children as cultural learners and innovative agents. It is in this spirit that I wrote the book, a story that connects anthropological inquiry to broad, interdisciplinary conversations on the emergence of morality, and an ethnography that focuses on young children—they are perhaps the least studied population in cultural anthropology, yet they are the future.

Jing Xu received her PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis and conducted postdoctoral research in developmental psychology at the University of Washington. Situated at the intersection of anthropology, psychology, and Chinese studies, her research examines morality, childhood, and cultural transmission in contemporary China and comparative contexts.

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2017 Ted Bestor Prize

April 11, 2018 by Yi Zhou

The Society for East Asian Anthropology awards the 2017 Ted Bestor Prize for Outstanding Graduate Paper to Gil Hizi for his paper “Marketized ‘Educational Desire’: Shifting and Reproduced Meanings of High-Education in Contemporary China.” Hizi is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Gil Hizi is reading in Hundred Flower Park in the Center of Jinan, China. Gil Hizi.

The 2017 Ted Bestor Prize also had two honorable mentions. Victoria Nguyen, a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago, was awarded honorable mention for her paper “Slow Construction: Alternative Temporalities and Tactics in the New Landscape of China’s Urban Development.” James Wright’s paper “Tactile Care, Mechanical Hugs: Japanese Caregivers and Robotic Lifting Devices” received another honorable mention. James is a PhD candidate at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong.

Named after the first president of SEAA, the Theodore C. Bestor Prize is awarded annually for the best graduate student paper on any aspect of East Asian anthropology and/or East Asian anthropology’s contribution to the broader field. Glenda Roberts (SEAA President and Professor at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies of Waseda University) chaired the 2017 Bestor Prize Committee, which included Andrew Kipnis (Professor of Anthropology in the School of Culture, History and Language of the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University) and Jenny Chio (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Emory University).

The deadline for submissions for the next Bestor Graduate Paper Prize (for papers written by graduate students in 2016) is  June 15th, 2018. For more information: https://seaa.americananthro.org/awards/bestor-prize-for-outstanding-graduate-paper/

2017 Bestor Prize Citations:

Winner: Gil Hizi (PhD candidate in anthropology at University of Sydney, Australia)

Paper Title: “‘Educational Desire’: Shifting and Reproduced Meanings of High-Education in Contemporary China”

Award Citation: “Educational Desire” gives us the opportunity to think about education in China beyond existing models.  Hizi’s detailed and thorough ethnographic accounts with university students in Shandong reveal how the university years are now seen as a life experience.  University is a kind of lifecourse stage for young Chinese adults after they pass the entrance exams but before they must face what students see as a tough world of employment, based on guanxi relationships and “hidden regulations” (qian guize). Into the breach steps the ethos of entrepreneurship, which universities are very much encouraging, to paraphrase Hizi, by allowing students to probe and engage with the uncertainty of the outside world without facing the risk of failure.  Meanwhile, they maintain their autonomy as students while gaining confidence as “entrepreneurs of the self” (in Rose’s 1998 sense), in projects that connect them to the larger society. Hizi skillfully frames this development by pointing out that although governmental policy expanded the number of universities, this did nothing to dampen families’ desires for their children to enter top universities. The numbers of degree holders increase year to year, yet the job market fails to meet expectations. Students end up feeling perplexed about how to maximize their time in university so as to do as best they can after graduation. Into this dilemma comes entrepreneurship, which soothes students’ qualms “by encapsulating a sense of meritocracy and competence.” Needless to say, universities such as the one studied by Hizi are wholeheartedly embracing this trend to foster entrepreneurial skills.  We congratulate Gill Hizi for submitting a well-conceptualized, highly informative paper with fresh insights, based on his thorough ethnographic research, and founded solidly in the extant literature.

Honorable Mention: Victoria Nguyen (PhD candidate in anthropology at University of  Chicago)

Victoria Nguyen

Paper Title: “Slow Construction: Alternative Temporalities and Tactics in the New Landscape of China’s Urban Development”

Award Citations: In “Slow Construction,” Victoria Nguyen introduces us to the politics of resisting urban redevelopment in contemporary urban Beijing.  At the moment of her research, poor elderly residents successfully resist relocation by refusing to accept compensation packages. Some pursue packages larger than the developers are willing to give, but others seem motivated by little other than a “non-instrumental obstructionism,” a desire to continue living in their decaying but memory-filled neighbourhoods.  Retired, accustomed to homes that others might consider dilapidated, and with time to kill, the resistors revel in the slowness of their tactics, frustrating the developers and their deadline-filled, fast temporalities.  Beautifully written and full of evocative photographs, this essay successfully inserts a temporal dimension to the space-obsessed ethnography of urban redevelopment.

Honorable Mention: James Wright (PhD candidate at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong)

The Hug in action. The carer on the left who is operating the Hug is wearing a support belt after suffering a herniated disc, which he attributed to transferring residents. James Wright.

Paper Title: “Tactile Care, Mechanical Hugs: Japanese Caregivers and Robotic Lifting Devices”

Award Citation: We are very happy to give an honorable mention to James Wright’s lucidly argued paper, titled “Tactile Care, Mechanical Hugs: Japanese Caregivers and Robotic Lifting Devices.” In this ethnographic case study of technology, human physicality, and techniques of care in a Japanese elderly care home, Wright thoughtfully weaves gently humorous vignettes of the implementation of a robotic lifting device called “The Hug” with an analytically sharp perspective on social and affective practices of care-giving and their implications for state efforts to “reform” elderly care. He argues that the resistance of staff members to such devices, while intended to help relieve the physical strain of lifting residents, illuminates persistent social values associated with touch, proximity, and compassion that undergird the relational work of care-givers. In so doing, Wright convincingly presents a complex narrative of human to technology to human relations that reveal the social negotiations at the heart of all technological innovations.

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Click and Touch: South Korean Missions in the IT Age

November 20, 2017 by Yi Zhou

Heather Mellquist Lehto

Editors’ Note: This article is part of the series Digital Anthropologies in East Asia.

As I walked through the corridor at Onnuri Church in Seoul, South Korea, I nearly passed by a bespectacled man holding a sign that read, “IT Missions School, 2nd floor” (IT sŏn-kyo-hak-kyo). Seeing the sign, I paused and asked him what kind of people would be attending the event, whether it was a conference for missionaries or whether it was open to anyone. “Can you use a smart phone?” he asked warmly. “Anyone who can use a smart phone is welcome.”

Over the next six weeks, several professional missionaries and around twenty students (myself included) met to train in IT missions at the school. We discussed how Korean Christians might use information technologies to evangelize and to “fight ISIS,” whom in 2015 the participants saw as winning the “spiritual war” (chŏng-sin-ŭi chŏn-chaeng) being waged through social media. Sessions included lectures by religious leaders and small group projects to develop and/or use mission technologies, intermingled with worship and prayer.

The lectures framed the IT Missions School—and South Korean Christianity—within a particular global history of technological progression. IT missions were deemed the appropriate response to the “new paradigm” (sae-lo-un p’ae-lŏ-ta-im) that accompanied the “IT age” (IT si-tae). The lectures detailed the “IT infrastructures God had built” (ha-na-nim-ŭn IT in-p’ŭ-la-lŭl ku-ch’uk-ha-syŏss-sŭp-ni-ta) to equip Christian missions throughout history, culminating in discussions of the media technologies the leaders were currently developing. Drawing upon Max Weber’s famous thesis of the elective affinity between Protestantism and rational capitalist development, these lectures argued that South Korean Christians had a unique calling to become IT missionaries. Weber, they said, demonstrated the close relationship between Protestantism and industrialization as they developed in Europe and North America. The historical coincidence of technological innovation at Korean conglomerates like Samsung and LG and the late growth of Protestantism in Korea (now the world’s foremost missionary-sending nation) signaled that “It’s Korea’s time,” as Loren Cunningham of Youth with a Mission (YWAM) announces in one IT Mission School video. In this context, the lectures communicated that the fate of both the nation’s tech industry and global Christendom depended upon South Korean Christians embracing the marriage of Christianity and technological invention.

Two leathery hands cradle a smart phone whose screen, like the hands themselves, is cracked. On the phone appears the image of a smiling Jesus Christ amidst a throng of disciples. This picture appears in a video advertisement for “Smart Bible,” an IT missions project that uploads Christian media onto donated smart phones such that short-term missionaries can leave these devices with people in their mission field. FMnC. 

I participated in a small group project on social media evangelism, the title of which roughly translates to “Missions at the End of One’s Hand” (son kkŭt’ sŏn-kyo). We were asked to create evangelism projects with the guidance of an experienced, professional missionary. Participants began cautiously posing ideas to turn their daily activities on social media into something of a mission field. One woman offered that she could use her Instagram and Pinterest accounts to spread positive, Christian messages. People spend time on these apps, she noted, because they may feel bored or perhaps are attracted to pretty images, designs, and inspirational quotes. “A couple of users I follow post touching [kam-tong-chŏk-in] pictures. Paintings of scriptures, too. Often, these posts really touch my heart [ma-ŭm kam-tong-si-k’i-ta]. So I think for my project, I can pray over Pinterest and ask God to tell me with whom I should share certain pictures.”

The unique place of Korean technology missionaries in the world was reinforced repeatedly, for example, through the project leader’s slogan for such work: “CLICK & TOUCH: Through the IT God put in our hands, click and touch the whole world” (CLICK & TOUCH: han-na-nim son-e put’ tŭl-lin IT-on se-sang-ŭl k’ŭl-lik-ha-ko t’ŏ-ch’i-ha-ta). Repeatedly, our leader prayed that God would inspire projects to transform cyberspace into the Kingdom of God, particularly in this period when, he argued, ISIS was successfully bending cyberspace in their own spiritual direction. At once a plea to God and a motivational speech to his team, his prayers advanced a vision of cyberspace allowing IT missionaries to do the kind of missionary work befitting God’s omnipresence—wherever, whenever, with whomever (ŏn-che-na, ŏ-ti-na, nu-ku-na).

IT missionaries place their hands on donated smart phones, praying that God would touch people through the use of these devices. FMnC. 

In a theological tradition in which hands and the sense of touch figure prominently in spiritual transmission and healing, the technologies that mediate religious practices come to mimic or take on the qualities formerly attributed to human hands. Large screens in telecasting churches are said to “embrace” (an-a chu-ta) congregations, wrapping around sanctuaries like the outstretched hands of a pastor giving a benediction. Many charismatic Korean pastors became famous for their ability to heal through laying hands on the sick, and now those same pastors are understood to heal through the broadcasts of their sermons. The ability for apparently distant or disembodied sociality to “touch” is emphasized, in slogans such as “Click and Touch” and “I.T.ouch.U.” In the words of one pastor featured in the IT missions promotional videos, “God will serve the coming world with Korean technology, and we should want to become the hands of God.” The idea that technologies alienate is well-rehearsed, as is the idea that social media use creates as much social distance as it presumes to overcome. But in these Korean Christian communities, the “digit” of “digital technology” is clear and unironic, reconfiguring at once the perceived role of South Korea in the global course of Christian history and how souls might feel a spiritual touch with each click from an IT missionary’s hand.

Heather Mellquist Lehto is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at UC Berkeley, with a master’s of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. Her dissertation explores technology in religious practice through ethnographic research at transnational churches in South Korea and the United States.

Cite as: Mellquist Lehto, Heather. 2017. “Click and Touch.” Anthropology News website, November 15, 2017.

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Not just another Gangnam Style: Framing politics and internet celebrity in East Asia

October 26, 2017 by Yi Zhou

Crystal Abidin

Editors’ Note: This article is part of the series Digital Anthropologies in East Asia.

In August 2016, a minute-long video of a middle-aged man flamboyantly singing and dancing to an upbeat number known as “PPAP” or “Pen Pineapple Apple Pen” went viral globally on YouTube. Singing in Japanese-accented English about a mutant combination of pens, pineapples, apples, and pens, he quickly became iconized by his gaudy ensemble of snake-print shirt and pants, leopard-print scarf, and sunglasses. The man was Piko-Taro, a fictional character played by entertainer DJ Kosaka Daimaou, who is actually 44-year-old Japanese comedian Mr Kazuhiko Kosaka.

The original video amassed over 124 million views on YouTube on top of reposts by numerous social media accounts, such as the over 71 million views on humour page 9GAG’s Facebook page. It didn’t take long before tens of thousands different variants of the PPAP video accumulated on the internet, cycling through the lifecycle of internet virality including YouTube content vernaculars including covers, remixes, parodies, loops, challenges, compilations, ‘how to’ tutorials, reactions, and rants, as well as capillaries of virality on other platforms including forum discussions, institutionalized wiki pages, celebrity endorsements, and the hawking of official and bootleg merchandise.

The second wave of virality arose when media reports around the world attempted to shed light on the new internet celebrity and his breakout hit. However, it was at juncture that discourse took a troubling turn. Dozens of global news outlets branded PPAP “the next Gangnam Style” and Piko-Taro as “the next Psy”, after the South Korean musician’ Psy’s hit single Gangnam Style in October 2012, as if all East Asian artistes were indistinctive caricatures. Global media also described the song and entertainer as “bizarrely hilarious” and “nonsensical”, or “the stupid thing” as “another pop meme imported from Asia” that has “started to make inroads into Western internet circles”. This troubling discourse that was amplified by for-profit clickbait popular media framed Asian internet virality as the exotic Other, the underdog and the oriental “magical” intrusion against the backdrop of a normal, hegemonic, Anglo-centric internet meme culture.

This media cycle is not only routine but also seemingly successful, as viral history repeated itself when Western media discovered the photo-editing app MeituXiuxiu in January 2017. Global reports similarly conflated Chinese and Japanese cultures through makeshift verbs like “kawaii-fy”, committed cultural misplacements like “plenty of senpai”, and indulged in sensationalist descriptors of East Asia such as “The bizarre, pink-soaked realms of Chinese mobile app stores are strange, seemingly alien places”.

An Influencer captures a snap admist a bustling party. Crystal Abidin

As a sociocultural anthropologist who has studied the manufacturing of vernacular internet celebrity in Singapore and Southeast Asia since 2010, such condescending and orientalist global media reactions angers me. But they also spur me to expand my research to consider the recentering (to borrow from media scholar Koichi Iwabuchi 2002) and decentering (to borrow from anthropologist Christine Yano 2013) of globalization when considering how East Asian internet celebrity emerge and circulate as cultural flows.

Historically, internet celebrity has been most extensively theorized as “microcelebrity”. As originally coined by global studies scholar Theresa Senft in 2008, it is a self-branding practice that relied upon selective disclosure, the cultivating of affective ties, and the maintenance of a digital persona as if it were “a branded good”. To date, microcelebrity has been theorized as labour, identified in branding, linguistic practice, academia, activism, and software developers.

East Asian smartphone technology reading East Asian selfie ages. Crystal Abidin

However, a vast majority of existing research looks into instances of White, English-speaking, middle-class microcelebrity in different spaces, or applies Anglo-centric theories to different localized case studies around the world. This is despite the fact that East Asian giants like China are among the leading global producer of technology and dominate exclusive social media platforms such as ​Tudou, Weibo, ​and ​Weixin; ​and that East Asian populations in countries like Singapore and South Korea are among the most lucrative and established microcelebrity industries. Shifting away from Anglo-centric, English-speaking, global North-platforms, only a handful of work focuses on national scapes with distinctive internet governance and platform politics, such as China, Indonesia, and Singapore.

In fact, microcelebrity is so uniquely pervasive in some parts of the world that I have studied a highly intensive and vocational internet celebrity I call “Influencers”. As microcelebrity becomes increasingly common as global behaviour, it raises more questions rather than homogenizes. For instance, in 2008, ‘micro’ referenced the limited amount of fame an internet personality could garner, compared to a Hollywood celebrity. In 2017, this must be recalculated, given convergences between traditional and new media, and the periphery-center-periphery flows of popular culture worldwide.

Awardees on stage at the Influence Asia awards 2017. Crystal Abidin

More troubling is the fact that most research from around the world continues to apply Anglo-centric theories to localized case studies, regardless of appropriateness or fit. Thus, new research in this area should commit to re-theorizing microcelebrity studies, by interrogating citation politics, intellectual biases, and the value of conducting microcelebrity research for public good.

East Asian internet celebrities – through their various incarnations as transient virality, established memes, groomed child celebrities, politicized posterchildren, weaponized microcelebrity, or bona fide Influencers – are valuable lens through which we can understand the makings of a society. Above and beyond the mere analysis of fame and the attention economy, such highly conspicuous yet understudied aspects of the youth digital labour market provide insights into self-entrepreneurship, cultural branding, and generational innovation in an increasingly technocratic society.

As the global Influencer industry continues to register milestones and developments in legality, economics, cultural issues, and social issues, anthropological rootings and interrogations will give due care and empathy to the context, vocabulary, and cultural praxis of everyday internet vernaculars in East Asia and beyond.

Dr Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, Researcher with Handelsrådet (Swedish Retail and Wholesale Development Council), and Adjunct Research Fellow with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Reach her at wishcrys.com.

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Hopeless Online & Yingyeo Culture in South Korea

October 17, 2017 by Yi Zhou

HyunJoo Mo

Editors’ Note: This article is part of the series Digital Anthropologies in East Asia.

It was around the late 2000s and early 2010s that young people of South Korea started to talk about the quasi-mythical story of online Yingyeo (superfluity) humans. It is said like, “In the online world, many Yingyeo humans can be found.” Yingyeo humans live there, because they are useless and undervalued in the offline world. Thus, they migrate to the online world, where they spend a lot of time trying to get attain recognition by undertaking all sorts of useless acts (i.e. spending time to online games, online community activities, fandom activities, social networks services, or web surfing for no particular purposes).

The culture and concept of online Yingyeo spread quickly through broad-based online communities like DC Inside (dcincide.com) or social media platforms like Twitter (twitter.com). The definition of Yingyeo humans, who almost reside exclusively in the virtual world, seem to bring about synchronized sympathy and situational awareness among many of today’s youth in South Korea. Online Yingyeo became a symbolic term for youths of the post-crisis unemployment generation in South Korea, who are isolated from the offline world and spend time alone together in the online space.

For an ethnography of online Yingyeo, I place an importance on examining both the online and offline contexts that contributed to the emergence and expansion of Yingyeo culture. I couldn’t regard this digital phenomenon as something that is separated from the offline world, solely respecting internal dynamics of the online world. As seen in its general definition, online Yingyeo people are originally formed by external (offline) dynamics that make people feel bad about them and their situations.

The Yingyeo generation had to face situations of unemployment and underemployment after the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. As the (male-centered) lifelong employment contract suddenly disappeared without any advance notice, South Korean society became panicked over the new socio-economic changes. For the post-crisis young adults in their 20s and 30s, the heteronormative and corporate model of salaryman and housewife — that had been prevalent and promoted during the industrialization era — has radically become something that is realistically unattainable, or even risky in case of loss of job or reduction of household income.

This foreign monetary crisis and the subsequent changes in employment patterns led to the emergence of unproductive and hopeless generations that don’t have stable jobs, a will or ability to get married or have children in traditional patterns. The elevated unemployed rate and the declined marriage rate have formed an implicit attitude in public discourses: Young people are unworthy and immoral (i.e. lazy, irresponsible) and that’s the reason that they do not have a stable job, secured income, or thriving future. In numerous youth discourses of both private and public spheres, the unstable futurity that is different from the past was regarded as the non-futurity and a subject of fear and anxiety.

What I have realized while doing my research on online Yingyeo culture since 2010, is that the online space acquires its unique importance in relation to the offline space. It does not mean that the online space is something that belongs to, or is secondary or additional to the offline world. Rather, it means that the online space can be more special when it functions as the outside of, or autonomous from, the offline. In other words, the special status or meaning of the online world tends to be created from its distance from the offline world. Online yingyeo world is somewhere you can stay and spend time forgetting the offline world.

The online world became a special arena for hopelessness in Yingyeo culture. Yingyeos are identified or proved by the duration of the time that they spent in the online world. Gamers can check how long they played, and online community members can see how often they upload postings and write replies. This digital immersion is regarded as the directionality toward the outside of the offline world. The Internet is somewhere Yingyeos can immerse themselves by forgetting about stresses or relations in the real world. On the web, it is full of admirable postings of Yingyeo acts that capably prove how one kills time consciously in a hopeless manner. For instance, someone boasts about the experience of counting the number of snacks in a snack pack. Or, someone shows off a work of sculpture that is made of stacked coins for no good.

In the online Yingyeo world, the unproductive time using of unproductive beings becomes the general pattern or even virtue. The collective time spending on the online world, in a specific manner, implies a kind of “structure of feeling” (Williams, 1954) that is formed among contemporary young Korean. This affect of online superfluity alludes to the impulse to have another space from the stressful offline world and to deal with mental hardships of having a stigmatized future, or no future. What the digital emotion of Yingyeo culture reflects is that Yingyeos share a commonality of no futurity.

Ernst Bloch argued, in his The Principle of Hope, that hopelessness dominates where there is nothing new to expect. Genuine hope is associated to the “What-has-not-yet-been,” although human beings tend to stick to the “What-has-been”, especially in a time of dismay or anxiety (Bloch, 1954). However, the “What-has-been” cannot exist forever and can be sometimes more illusionary than the “What-has-not-yet-been.” The stable future that was once provided by the corporate-centered and patriarchal family system during the industrial era is not sustainable anymore in South Korea. The future has vanished.

Aspiring for a stable future is seen as quite delusional in online Yingyeo culture. On the contrary, the no futurity becomes the common sense or condition with which Yingyeos have to live. Here lies the tacit, truthful claim of the online Yingyeo culture. Online Yingyeo humans are not hopeless or pathetic creatures. Instead, they can’t help but have no illusionary hope. It is not that they have no future, but the future is lost.

HyunJoo Mo is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her current research focuses on digital culture, youth, gender, temporality, and affect in South Korea.

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Deterritorializing Chinatown in Digital Tokyo

October 2, 2017 by Yi Zhou

Jamie Coates

Editors’ Note: This article is part of the series Digital Anthropologies in East Asia.

In 2008 a small group of Chinese business owners gathered together to propose the official declaration of a new Chinatown in Tokyo. Ikebukuro, the second busiest station in the Northwestern corner of Tokyo’s central loop-line, had attracted growing numbers of Chinese students and entrepreneurs in the preceding decades, and in the eyes of some had already become a Chinatown of sorts. The proposal was touted as a means of rebranding already existing networks of Chinese businesses in the area, hoping to mirror the success of historic Chinatowns in Japan, such as in Yokohama and Kobe. Ikebukuro’s Chinatown designation was intended to represent the new overseas Chinese community in Japan. Migrants from the People’s Republic of China grew to become the largest non-Japanese minority in Japan in 2006, and are mostly made up of those who followed education-oriented pathways into the country after 1985. From student-workers and trainees, the earlier generation of this migrant group have since established themselves as independent business-owners and/or employees in Japanese companies and public institutions. The majority however, are relatively young with fluid identities, diverse interests, and quickly changing ambitions.

The northern corner of Ikebukuro hosts over 300 Chinese-owned businesses and its municipal district (Toshima ward) is home to more than 13,000 Chinese nationals. More significantly, the station connects to many wider networks of Chinese sociality in the city. The official government response to the Chinatown proposal was that the Chinese community was too new, and too disengaged from local Japanese organizational activities to warrant official recognition. The phrase ‘let’s start from a dialogue’ (mazu kōryu kara) was repeated in various media reports at the time, exemplar of the polite yet distinctly conclusive way Japanese institutions reject these sorts of proposal. Unable to gain official approval, several of the initial proponents of the Chinatown proposal side-stepped Japanese stakeholders by producing a ‘Tokyo Chinatown’ website that links to various social media. In turn, Ikebukuro’s unofficial Chinatown status has been supported by some Japanese scholars and activists, serving as a symbol of new urban diversity in Japan.

Two young women streaming from an Ikebukuro bar. Jamie Coates

From these accounts one might assume that the Chinatown proposal reflects a newly forming Chinese community in Ikebukuro, as well as its tense relationship with local Japanese officials. However, the growth in digital forms of sociality and their intersection with new mobilities has ensured that many Chinese community-forming practices in Tokyo have taken on less territory oriented dynamics. Based on fieldwork in Ikebukuro, the Chinatown proposal by no means reflected the patterns of sociality and identification among the majority of ethnic Chinese in Tokyo, nor Ikebukuro. In fact, the Chinatown’s rejection was met with sighs of relief among many of Ikebukuro’s circles, with people stating that Chinatowns are an older form of sociality no longer fitting the way Tokyo’s relatively new Chinese population want to live their lives.

One young woman from Shijiazhuang told me that Chinatowns do not reflect how her peers imagine places such as Ikebukuro. She continued, stating the Chinatown and its accompanying website and ideals, for instance, were ‘dead’ (si). In contrast, the intersection of smartphones and social media has ensured that Chinese sociality intersects with wider patterns of otherness in Tokyo. One young man from Nanjing, for instance, even jokingly said to me ‘Tokyo’s Chinatown is online (wangshang)’. While Tokyo’s Chinatown may be ‘online’, it does not follow patterns of strict co-ethnic identification, nor was it disconnected from analogue spaces in the city. Rather than connecting to a single ethnic enclave, digital Chinese sociality in Tokyo connects multiple Sinophone social media platforms to a heterotopic spread of bars, restaurants, social clubs, churches, schools, and various other spaces tucked away within the urban spread of the city. Some of these spaces were clustered around major stations such as Ikebukuro, Shinjuku and Ueno, but this was not always the case. Moreover, this kind of spatial arrangement suggested less about Chinese social life in the city than it did the ways the relationship between digital and analogue life intersects with Tokyo’s already heterotopic qualities.

A woman selling steamed buns in Yokohama. Jamie Coates

The choice of platform in negotiating these many connections and places reflects the differing scaling effects of digital sociality. These scales cut across extant associations between ethnicity and place in Tokyo, following logics of conviviality and practice more so than ethnic identification. At the same time, the conviviality of shared meanings, particularly in terms of joking, ensured that certain social media platforms had aggregating effects. WeChat, for example, was decidedly Sinophone, whereas platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (which are technically banned in mainland China), were used to navigate multi-lingual networks of practice in Tokyo, such as fan groups, artist collectives and nightlife based friendships. Private WeChat groups such as one titled ‘the mental asylum’, which I followed during fieldwork from 2014-2016 were born out of chance encounters in bars across Tokyo, and became a site for the circulation of private images that parody Chinese pop culture, as well as complex Sinophone language games. Others, such as a group of Chinese-speaking artists, musicians and documentarians formed out of shared interests and eventually became an inclusive space for Chinese-speaking people from around the world, including me. These groups were spaces of constant chatter, and frequently turned into face-to-face meetings throughout the city to sing karaoke and eat Chinese food.

Chinatowns in Japan, much like in other parts of the world, have stood as a curious means of territorializing ethnic groups in the city. Yokohama’s Chinatown emerged out of legal restrictions on the occupations and spaces Chinese workers could enter in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. From the 1980s it was refurbished and reinvented to become a place where ethnic Others were celebrated as consumable and desirable. However, the new Chinatowns of Tokyo appear to differ. From the legal, to the cultural and political, the spatial dynamics of Chineseness and otherness in Japanese cities has taken on new patterns in recent years. Enabled by digitalized sociality, the young Chinese population in Tokyo reflects a diversity that is nowhere but everywhere, aggregated in terms of practice and shared interest, and resistant to the demarcation of ethnic enclaves, such as those embodied in the term ‘Chinatown’. 

Jamie Coates works on Sino-Japanese mobilities and their effect on young Chinese identities. In particular, he is interested in how migration, media, and play shape young Chinese efforts to re-imagine co-ethnic and regional ideas of commonality. He is currently a visiting fellow at Sophia University.

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Digital Video Archive: “Voices from Tohoku” Oral Narrative

September 15, 2017 by Yi Zhou

東北からの声https://tohokukaranokoe.org/

David H. Slater

Note: This project was supported by grants from Toyota Foundation, a Kaken grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education, and various sources from within Sophia University.  A more detailed outline of the archive can be found here: Public Anthropology of Disaster and Recovery : “Archive of Hope”(希望ア–カイブ)

David Slater

 

Of all of the data that has inundated us during this digital revolution, from the flow of images and texts to tweets and links, we have also experienced a loss in our attention to the human voice in narrative. Perhaps this became especially acute for me in the aftermath of the March 11th, 2011 triple disasters in Japan. Because of the disruption of time and place, of life course and communities, oral narrative has emerged as a privileged way to understand and share this condition within and beyond the affected communities. Digital media has also, somewhat paradoxically, allowed voice and face, those most analogue elements of data, to be gathered and made accessible in ways that were not before possible. In “Voices from Tohoku” we have collected our own interviews into the largest archive of video oral narratives on the 3.11 disasters, and one of the largest oral narrative projects on any topic.

The archive is the work of students at Sophia University who have conducted more than 500 hours of semi-structured interviews throughout Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures from the spring of 2011 until 2015 (when we ran out of money). Thus, unlike some other projects which are primarily portal sites that link to and aggregate other data, our archive contains only the data we have generated ourselves. Our videos are people telling their own story in their own words.

Top page for Voices from Tohoku. David Slater

Most interviews are between 1 and 2 hours long, and the full scholarly archive contains all of these unedited digital videos, almost completely transcribed and thus searchable, which we have made accessible to scholars from Japan, Asia, Europe and North America. There is also an open “community” website with thousands of shorter clips of 1-3 minutes. These clips are geographically and thematically tagged. The website has more than 80,000 hits now—which in the world of oral narrative are rock-star numbers. Our site is plain without impressive graphics and only basic coding. Because it is designed primarily as a way for us to share our interviews with our narrators in Tohoku, it is only in Japanese now (but Google Translate can give you a rough idea).

We did not start as a research project at all. In the spring of 2011, students from Sophia University trucked up to Tohoku to volunteer, working wherever we were most needed until one day, upon seeing our cameras, an old woman in a Miyagi “temporary” housing unit invited a group of our students in because “she had something to tell us.” That “something” ended up lasting many hours over 3 days. She felt that her own government was not very interested in what she, or any local, had to say, and the mass media had already plotted their pre-set narratives. She, and hundreds of others, would rather we took time to record their stories than dig tsunami mud from their living rooms. While this was surprising at the time, it was something we were trained to do—oral narrative interviewing. From then, we began a new schedule: volunteer work in the morning, interviews in the afternoon, and usually nomikai drinking parties at night. Most of my students from Tokyo, not Tohoku. As such, they were enough “outsider” so that local residents wanted to tell them their stories. And when you’ve spent hours, days and weeks in a community doing volunteer work, it is much easier to generate the sort of goodwill and understanding that is so vital to good interviewing.

Interviewer using personal photos as narrative prompts in Minami-Sanriku. David Slater

The archive did not emerge until 2013, after we had been interviewing for almost two years, as we were trying to figure out what we would do with our interviews. In 2012, after an interview, we were told by one fisherman in Rikuzen Takata: “Don’t be like those other ‘researchers’ who just take our stories and disappear. We are busy people; we are only telling you this so you will DO something with them.”  This website is our effort to DO something that will be meaningful to the narrators, to share their stories with each other and with a wider audience.  

Our archive is characterized by not only its scope but also by its diversity. Some narrators start their story on the ‘day of,’ (あの日), as a point of references from which they then move backwards and forwards. (We never asked directly about that day until they brought it up—sometimes it is as important to find ways to forget as it is to remember.) Others start speaking as representatives of their community, offering up continually refined set pieces in ways that (we came to think) sought to reestablish some coherent and presentable face for both the individual as well as the community. There are many hopeful stories of heroic struggle in overcoming challenges, and there are just as many “crying stories” of pain and suffering—but it is almost always more complex than that. At times, the narrators are viciously critical of conceits and duplicity—of the State, of TEPCO (the electric company that runs the Fukushima reactors), or even their neighbors and themselves. Other times, our narrators were halting, feeling their way through a topic, talking to and for themselves as much as for us.

Narrators’ page for Ishinomaki. Each narrator has 3-5 shorter clips, thematically coded and transcribed. David Slater

An archive of scope, structured in a coherent fashion that enables efficient accessibility will outlive most journal articles or books. Moreover, this research model has also allowed us to more fully involve undergraduate students over an extended periods of time than I never imagined, and to collaborate with other researchers, communities, NPOs and social movements in ways that have created scholarly, political and civil potential, that we and others, are only beginning to appreciate and develop.

Sadly, we no longer have funding for Tohoku travel, but we are doing great oral narrative projects in Tokyo of anti-nuke movement, youth protests, irregular labor, homelessness and social justice issues. I am always only too happy to explain how we do what we do, and to collaborate on future projects with others.

 

David H. Slater is the Director of the Institute of Comparative Culture, and professor of cultural anthropology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Graduate Program in Japanese Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo.

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Disasters Digitized: Participatory Archiving and Collaborative Commemoration

August 21, 2017 by Yi Zhou

Ryo Morimoto

Although much has been said about the triple disaster—earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns—in Japan in March 2011 (hereafter, 3.11), the upsurge of digital records and efforts to archive them in and outside of Japan after these events have been less discussed. These archives are populated not only with born-digital artifacts (e.g., photographs, audio files, video footages, websites and blogs) but also digitalized artifacts (e.g., bureaucratic documents, pamphlets circulated in temporary shelters, 3D renditions of tsunami-damaged buildings). As of June 2017, more than six years after 3.11, there are over 60 digital archive projects, hosted by the local and national governments, private and non-profit sectors, and academic institutions, all with the goal to preserve and transmit digital(ized) traces of the past. Disaster digital archives are both a collaborative space where survivors are delegating “the responsibility of remembering” (Nora 1989:13) and a touch-point where the meaning of reconstruction (fukkō) are performed and negotiated.

In Japan, disaster archives are conceived not merely as a tool for information storage, retrieval and transmission. They also have come to play a key role in disaster reconstruction. In June 2011, the Reconstruction Design Council in Response to the Great East Japan Earthquake released a document entitled “Toward Reconstruction: ‘Hope beyond the Disaster’” which lays out 7 principles of disaster reconstruction design. According to the first principle, the foundation of reconstruction rests on survivors’ ability to mourn and commemorate the dead. Therefore, reconstruction efforts should be geared toward preserving records of the disaster so that they may be analyzed scientifically and the lessons learned from them can be transmitted across generations and throughout the world. However, this document does not specify what is worth preserving, how these materials should be preserved, and what constitutes reconstruction/fukkō from the disasters. These stipulations come to be worked out and materialized through the process of assembling an archive. The act of archiving, as Derrida reminds us, “produces as much as it records the event” (1995: 17).

If the content of an archive matters deeply, then so does its medium. Social media platforms like Twitter have transformed the way disasters are experienced locally and globally (see Johnson 2014; Yoshitsugu 2011) with implications for efforts to archive and memorialize disasters online. Emerging digital technologies enable the seamless recording and instantaneous sharing of an event as it unfolds, transforming each user into a curator and achiever of the everyday (Giannach 2016). Although the digital documentation of disasters might seem as straightforward as snapping a photo on your smartphone, digital records are difficult to preserve, in part because so many of them are produced, and in part because rapid technological change leads to shifting standards of usability and technical formats (Flecker 2003). The vastness, transiency, and instability of digital material require deliberate preservation efforts and continuous investment in human and technological resources.  

Moreover, while digital disaster archives can ensure more immediate and broader circulation of information than traditional archives, the openness digital technologies affords has posed limitations on what can be preserved in the present. In the case of Japan, most disaster archive projects shy away from sharing images that include people’s faces, since making these images public risks violating Japanese right of likeness and privacy laws. In order to share these images, archivists must either painstakingly pixel out individual faces, or obtain formal consent from each person appearing in the image.

As I have discussed elsewhere (Morimoto 2014), making disaster archives digital often, ironically and despite the best intentions, involves removing traces of subjectivity and therefore risks the potential forgetting of the individuals involved. For example, the project lead of the Michinoku Shinrokuden archive at International Research Institute of Disaster Science at Tohoku University insists that disaster archives should try to preserve “correct” information about the past events. Although a survivor’s narrative of escaping from the tsunami by a car is certainly a harrowing and memorable story, it might not offer an empirically informed lesson to future, potential victims. During 3.11, huge masses of people attempted to evacuate by car, leading to a traffic gridlock that ultimately increased the number of disaster-related deaths. When archivists historicize the past with the particular goal of reconstruction (“building back better”) in mind, the tendency is sometimes to commemorate the disasters themselves, rather than the lives they touched or destroyed.

The Japan Disasters Digital Archive (JDA) project at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University approaches the commemoration of past disasters differently (Figure 1).

Fig 1. The Japan Disasters Digital Archive Homepage (JDA Introduction Video). Ryo Morimoto

Unlike other projects, JDA does not preserve most of its materials. Instead, it hosts links to digital materials shared by over 15 partner projects in Japan and the U.S., thereby acting as a digital networking portal. Moreover, with its personal collection-building feature, JDA is designed to foster a collaborative virtual environment. When users access the archive, they are exposed to an ever-expanding group of fellow archivists: from affiliates of archive projects who share links to their archived materials, to the ordinary user who submits a personal testimonial or blog she discovered online along with her personal photographs of the disasters, to the historian who creates a public collection within the archive in order to understand the interaction between public and private actors in disaster relief efforts. In this way, JDA preserves traces of user participation and interaction, while creating records of the user-oriented reconstruction of past events, and of the collaborative construction of cultural memories in the present.

JDA has been developed with an eye toward pedagogical use. Classroom activities involving JDA at Harvard University, Emory University and Tohoku University illustrate the possibilities of participatory disaster archiving. Students have used JDA in public presentations geared toward teaching the wider public, in Japan and abroad, about the global significance of 3.11 (Figure.2).

Fig 2. Tohoku University students visiting Harvard in September 2015 and giving a presentation about 3.11, intended for the wider Cambridge Japanese Studies and Digital Humanities community. Ryo Morimoto

In this manner, digital archives can lead to off-line, cross-cultural communication and commemoration. U.S.-Japan collaborations around digital disaster archival projects like JDA invites us to consider how novel tools and technologies might challenge the relationship between national identity and collective memory, and the divide between east and west.

 

Ryo Morimoto is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, where he also serves as the manager of Japan Disasters Digital Archive. His research examines shifting local perceptions of radiation exposure in post-nuclear accident Fukushima, and the cultural history of representation surrounding radiation, radioactive materials and nuclear energy. 

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Devaluing Human Labor

August 8, 2017 by Yi Zhou

Shuang Frost

The rise in economic inequality associated with technological displacement is one of the defining issues of our time. Last year the White House reported that recent advances in AI will result in the obsolescence of millions of low and medium-skill jobs and the depression of wages for ordinary workers. This prediction echoes an emerging consensus in social scientific literature: that the trend of widening inequality will only accelerate as more firms move to achieve cost advantages by replacing labor with capital. To glimpse a future of dire technological inequality, one need look no further than the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the wealthiest regions of America with the highest rates of eviction and homelessness. As Russel Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, recently explained in an interview with MIT Technology Review, “When we used to have booms in the tech sector, it would lift all boats. That not how it works anymore.”

So what is driving this hollowing out of jobs at the bottom and middle of society? Is it simply the case that increasingly intelligent and efficient machines are outmoding their human counterparts in all but a narrow set of economic activities? Certainly this is not the whole story. The tech industry’s reshaping of society has been driven not only by technological factors, but also deeply social ones. In the past two decades, tech firms have engaged in a dialectical process of emphasizing the superiority of technologies and simultaneously devaluing human labor.

As machine capability expands into new realms of human activity, it inevitably replaces some of the human skills and knowledge needed to get jobs done. This in turn is thought to cause a deskilling of workers (think for example of the secretarial profession after the advent of the personal computer). But there is also a concurrent process of enskillment which takes place. Social scientists have shown that with the advent of any new technology, workers must acquire new skills and apply their embodied knowledge in order to make the technology useful. As Cristina Graseni argued in her book, Skilled Vision, “there is no fixed algebra of skill and machine by which an increase of technology means a decrease of skill.” This is because human workers are not just the users of technologies, but also their active re-inventors.

Take for example the transportation industry. In the past five years, the spread of ride-sharing platforms has led to a fundamental reconfiguration of urban transportation and a supposed deskilling of the transportation industry. The remarkable growth of these technologies and the rise of the world’s most valuable start-ups— Uber ($68billion) and Didi ($50 billion) — has been predicated on a business model of substituting professionalized, monopolistic service providers (i.e. traditional taxi companies) with decentralized low-cost labor. Reports show that in some American cities, the hourly income of Uber drivers after expenses falls below minimum wage. In China where fares are much lower still, many drivers claim that they can barely cover costs.

This radical reduction in wages has justified by claims that transportation is a deskilled profession and that service providers are merely acting as extensions of technologies (such as GPS navigation and customer-driver pairing algorithms).  However, I found in my research of ride-sharing industry in China that such characterizations are misleading. Firstly, ride-sharing services depend upon the knowledge, skills, and social relations of drivers. After joining the platform, drivers learn which smartphones work best with the app and which telecommunication networks offer the most reliable service in the areas that they operate. They develop strategies for making customers happy and boosting their user ratings. The drivers form online communities to share tacit knowledge about things like earning subsidies and promotions and avoiding getting caught by the police in places where the app is still illicit. Though these processes of enskillment, knowledge-making, and socialization often go unacknowledged by ride-sharing firms, they constitute an indispensable human infrastructure that enables the smooth functioning of technological platforms.

Advertisement of taxi-hailing app Kuaidi inside of Shanghai subway (2014). Shuang Frost

Secondly, on ride-sharing platforms a significant percentage of drivers are full-time professionals. Both in America and in China, Uber rolled out subsidy structures that encourage individuals to make driving for Uber their full-time jobs. Drivers are rewarded with “bonus” fares if they stay on call for a certain number of hours per day or complete a specified number of trips within a given week. As a result, many Uber drivers work roughly the same hours as their traditional taxi-driving counterparts. In China, many drivers claim that they rely on bonuses to make ends meet. One man joked that being a part-time driver is like being Lei Feng: you do it only out of a selfless commitment to society. Nevertheless, Uber has consistently refused to categorize drivers as employees. By instead categorizing them as “independent contractors,” the company avoids paying employee benefits, thus keeping the cost of labor artificially low.  

Social tensions caused by technological displacement show no signs of abating. According to a recent study, in the next 10 to 20 years, 57 percent of jobs in OECD countries and 77 percent of jobs in China are at risk of being displaced by automating technologies. The transportation industry will be one of the sectors most affected. Autonomous driving cars and semi-trucks alone could displace the 12-15 percent of the world’s workforce.

This newest wave of displacement is not necessarily a bad thing. Like technological innovations of the past, advances in AI have the potential to free us humans from certain repetitive tasks and enable us to focus on more creative work. However, it is important to consider how the benefits of technologies are distributed and to recognize the value of the knowledge and skills that ordinary workers bring to this socio-technological transition.

 

Shuang Frost is a Ph.D. candidate of anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary field in Science, Technology, and Society. Her dissertation looks at the economic, political, and social impacts of the ride-sharing industry in contemporary urban China. Her broader research interests include digital technology, moral economy, and corporate governance.

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Making Money Visible: Digital Money and Financial Precarity amongst Chinese Migrant Workers

June 21, 2017 by Yi Zhou

Tom McDonald

In the summer of 2016, I and my students were in the industrial city of Shenzhen, South East China, conducting a small exploratory study aimed at gaining an overview of migrant factory workers’ attitudes towards digital money platforms. Over two weeks, we had spoken to many migrant factory workers, uncovering a range of differing attitudes towards the platforms and their use. On one extreme, some migrants seemed to conduct almost all of their daily economic life through these technologies, ranging from purchasing snacks in convenience stores to sending remittances back home to their villages in rural China. At the opposite end of the spectrum other migrants largely eschewed these technologies in preference of cash transactions for the majority of uses (Figure 1). Plenty of migrants lay somewhere inbetween, adopting particular features of the platforms as suited their own lives. As is so often the case in anthropology, the ‘data’ reflected not clear observable correlations, but rather a ‘mish-mash’ of differing preferences and attitudes. However, the popularity of Yu’e bao (an online savings account linked to the Alipay payment platform) stood out amongst our interactions. Almost all of the migrants we encountered used this function, often choosing to keep most of their cash savings stored in this way, instead of using traditional cash deposit accounts with (typically State-owned) banks.

Fig 1. QR codes for digital payment in worker’s canteen (Photo: LC Kwok)

Yu’e bao was attractive for a couple of practical reasons. First, money could be instantaneously transferred out of Yu’e bao and into Alipay for spending, transfer or other purposes. Second, as Alipay was owned by a private company, it could reward savers with interest at a slightly higher rate than competing banks. Although participants were often aware of these benefits, it was another issue – the visible way interest was paid into their account – that seemed to most often appear in migrants’ discussions of these services, as evidenced by the exchange between two male migrants below:

 “Then there’s Yu’e bao… you put your money in there and you get a little bit of interest everyday …”

 “…Because for some people, they don’t necessarily have a lot of money, and they don’t necessarily want to deposit it. Let’s say you put it in, sometimes you’ll earn 0.1RMB, 1RMB, but it’s somewhat small. Seeing your balance growing a little, it’s still [ok]… although the money you earn will never be the same as the devaluation in currency.”

Alipay paid interest into Yu’e bao users’ accounts on a daily basis (instead of monthly or annually, as was the case with banks), while also making both the balance and the daily earnings instantly viewable (Figure 2). It was this increased visibility of users’ savings – rather than the higher interest rates, or added convenience – that particularly appealed to participants. Why were migrant workers particularly eager to have their savings made visible in this way, and what can this tell us about how digital money fits in to the lives of this marginal population?

Fig 2. Display of user balance and daily interest payments on yu’e bao

Part of the answer to this question comes from appreciating the broader context of the financial precarity faced by migrant workers, made manifest in acute anxiety around being cheated out of money. The growth of digital money platforms was perceived to have opened up new avenues through which deception could take place. These risks were also made visible around the communities where migrants lived. Crudely plastered onto the wall of alleyways were adverts for jiedaibao, an online peer-to-peer lending service. “They say it’s a scam,” one migrant worker claimed to me. The State also sought to protect its citizens from other similar risks: every evening a public information video produced by the local police force was displayed on the giant LED video screens in the nearby public square and cinema lobby, both of which were regularly frequented by migrant workers finishing their factory shifts. The video, played at regular intervals, featured a young police officer warning the public to avoid being cheated by taking care not give out their personal details online, and to avoid sending funds to strangers online over social media platforms (Figure 3).

Fig 3. Public information film aimed at tackling online scams (Photo: LC Kwok)

Running parallel to these concerns about online money platforms, many migrant workers also felt a desire to alter their lives so that they would not need to rely on factory work for their income indefinitely. The stability offered by work on the production line came with little room for future progression. Malls and other places located closeby to factories advertised private training courses to learn new skills such as 3D design, hairdressing and beauty treatments, although such courses were expensive, and rarely lead to the kinds of new careers those selling such tuition promised. Migrants also expressed interest in starting business, but were similarly worried about losing income this way.

Understanding this broader context helps us to understand the appeal of Yu’e bao, making migrants’ money – both total savings and also daily growth – more visible to themselves. This appealed to migrant factory workers desire to transform their lives by leaving factory work (with money being deemed necessary for affecting such a change), while ameliorating their fear of losing money through falling victim to cheats or scams. While Yu’e bao’s paltry interest rates may never actually provide migrants with the kind of growth needed for them to realise their ambitions, the platform is nevertheless viewed as a seemingly ‘safe’ place to deposit what limited savings they have, where they can see their money is ‘growing a little everyday’ while also remaining tangible and accessible through worker’s smartphones and mobile apps.

The example of migrant workers in Shenzhen has a broader significance for economic anthropology, confirming Maurer’s assertion that digital forms of money should not be assumed to represent the ‘next stage’ in the evolution of money, or that they are destined to create financial inclusion. Rather, migrant workers in Shenzhen see Yu’e bao as the best option amongst a limited range of places for storing their money because it addresses specific concerns about managing risk while also appearing in accordance with a desire to alter their lives through financial accumulation, even if the rewards of saving this way mean that such aspirations may never truly materialize.

Tom McDonald is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Hong Kong. His first solely-authored monograph, Social Media in Rural China: Social Networks and Moral Frameworks (UCL Press), was published in 2016. He also co-authored the volume How the World Changed Social Media (UCL Press). McDonald is currently investigating digital money in China.

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