My Electronic Life in China

Sunset at North Royal Pond in Beijing. Photo by: Fang Sheng

[I wrote this article about a year ago for a writing contest. Since it wasn't selected, I'm reposting it here.]

I arrive in Beijing late at night. Even though the lock-down has long been lifted, Mother, paranoid about COVID, has booked a hotel and wants me to self-isolate for a few days before going to her home. She’s asked my brother to drop off my late father’s phone at the front desk – there’s money in its WeChat app for me to pay the hotel bill and buy stuff I’d need in those days.

It’s late, I’m hungry. There’s a night market right across the street from the hotel, bustling with people trying to get an evening bite from the variety of tiny restaurants lining the sidewalks. I walk into a noodle shop. There aren’t too many customers, but the woman behind the counter tells me, “Our waiter is off now. Order with scan.” pointing at the QR code sticker on the table. Seeing me looking confused, she gives a faint smile, “You don’t know how? Where are you from?”

“Canada.” I squeezed out a grimace, feeling busted in the city I was born. My fluent Mandarin with typical Beijing accent wouldn’t help much even in ordering food here? She holds in a little sigh and turns around to punch in my order into the computer on the counter. I can visualize her eyes rolling up behind me. In just a few minutes a delicious bowl of noodles appears on my table.

The mission of my trip to China is to help my mother downsize and adapt to widowed life. I plan to stay at least a year, not only to help handle practical matters, but to give my sensitive, sometimes control-freak mother the necessary emotional support to transition out of the shadow of my father’s untimely death from COVID.

For this, I need a local phone. One that allows me to do all the online shopping with Taobao or Alibaba, or pay everywhere cashless with WeChat Pay or Alipay. I only shop occasionally on Amazon in Canada. But I’ve heard and seen so much about China’s electronic shopping platforms and payment practices, the curiosity is definitely getting the best of me.

And indeed, once I’ve got my new phone number and linked WeChat and Alipay to my Chinese bank account, the convenience is incredible! For example, there was a supermarket right down my parents’ apartment building in their old neighbourhood. They always did their grocery in person over there. But after we’ve moved Mother to the down-sized apartment, the nearest supermarket is a 20-minute walk away – too far for the 85-year-old relying on a walker. Neither does she drive. I have to teach her how to grocery shop with her phone. As I’ve never done this myself in Canada, I’d learn it from my sister-in-law first, that there’s a Mr. Hippo – a supermarket by Jack Ma (yes, that Alibaba founder), where you can order everything you need and they will deliver it to your home, usually with no extra charge. From vegetables, fruits to meats, even freshly slaughtered fish, you can pick a convenient time, and the delivery person will bring them to your door, as fast as in 30 minutes. And if you are not happy with the quality or freshness of any item, you can dispute on the app and have the charge refunded, with no question asked – not that we’ve actually done that. What makes Mr. Hippo so fast is that they still maintain a number of physical stores in central locations across the city. People can still come and shop for in-store deals unavailable online, like fast-sales of end-of-day items such as breads, meats, or deli. In the store, you can see staff running around – literally running – with a shopping basket in one hand, cellphone on the other, apparently reading the order list from it. They dash from one aisle to another, picking goods from the same shelves as the shoppers do. Once their basket is full, they run over to a loading station, hang the basket onto a vertical conveyor belt, which carries it up to a track system on the ceiling. Yes, the ceiling is all fitted with automated tracks, carrying baskets from all corners of the store to the back room, where “riders” are waiting to pick up and deliver the orders. I once tried to follow the tracks. Can’t even keep up. No wonder all the order fulfillers are young people who can run fast and for a long time. Why doesn’t China win marathons?

Online shopping boomed particularly during the pandemic. Virtually anything can be purchased online with home delivery. One job that also boomed along the process is the delivery service. Known as “riders”, these in-city delivery people usually sign up on several platforms as “riders” and snatch up orders the minute they are released. They wear a yellow jacket or vest, and ride on an electric scooter, zooming through chaotic traffic. During the economic downturn, being a “rider” can at least bring some basic income. So many young people, including university graduates, unable to find a stable job, would work as “riders”. Joined by many unemployed middle-aged men and women, this massive labour force is cheap and competitive. And the “platforms” – companies using such delivery services – put tough KPIs on riders such as delivery time and courtesy. Any bad rating from customers might result in the rider losing a whole day’s of earning. So, you’d see those yellow jackets (pun unintended) zinging in the streets, dashing red lights, rushing against traffic, all for completing an order in the prescribed time. The streets of Beijing, or similar mega cities in China, are a jungle of racing scooters, so dangerous for any senior citizens like my mother to even want to take a walk without worrying about being hit.

For me, the convenience is exactly in going out. Beijing’s transit system is so dense and well connected, with over 25 subway lines and countless bus routes. For less than a dollar, there’s no place you can’t reach. Plus, there are several brands of shared bicycles all over the city, also dirt-cheap, as low as $3 a month for unlimited rides of under 1 hour each, or $0.30 for a single ride-as-you-go. Millions of such shared bicycles are lining the streets (often blocking the sidewalks), all equipped with GPS. You can find one anywhere and drop it off at wherever your destination is. I’d beep into the subway, and unlock a shared bicycle for the last kilometer, if any, all with my cellphone. I’d never need a wallet bulging from my back pocket like a deformed butt lift. As I always put my cellphone in the front pocket, at least my butt looks even.

In just the four years I didn’t visit because of the lockdown, Beijing has changed so much, that many places are beyond recognition. I love to ride the transit and shared bicycles during non-peak hours, and enjoy the bustling city scene I rarely experience in Canada. Before I had this new Chinese cellphone, I’d often got lost in the city I grew up in. Now with map apps such as Baidu Maps or Gaode Maps, I can go anywhere without worry, including not worrying about data overage. I had no idea data could be dirt-cheap like this: a 100 Gigabyte plan costs only about $10 a month, a fraction of the similar plan in Canada, and much faster! Hear that, Rogers! And there’s connection everywhere, even in the subway! Hear that, Toronto!

I have to digress though: all this convenience I enjoy also comes with some awkwardness. Maybe I’ve been a Canadian for too long, I feel particularly awkward when I transact for the first time with businesses here in China. They’d almost always want me to sign up for some sort of membership, for the x% member’s discount or whatever promotion they are running. And if I said yes, the shop clerk would tell me to download their mini app, then would even grab my phone to “help” me click all the Oks. At first, I am quite alarmed, but pretty soon I realize that they are genuinely doing me a “favour” – saving me the “trouble” of going through all the standard consent terms – they all give the app sweeping access to all your phone's functions anyway: address book, camera, microphone and location. Seeing Chinese consumers like my brother and his wife all just click through nonchalantly for the sake of a good deal and convenience, I then feel assured and would do the same. The next time I come to a restaurant, and am told to “order with scan” (they all have a mini-app that can link to your WeChat Pay or Alipay, and they always tell customers to use it), I’d just go ahead and click “yes” and “yes”. People here don’t seem to mind that their personal data are stored with all various businesses and be flooded with promos. They can always just delete the app and deactivate the consents, after they’ve enjoyed the deals. But I have my limits: I don’t buy stuff from live streams. There are millions of influencers who open up their online channels and directly sell stuff there, from cosmetics, electronics, foods, handbags, to vacation packages or even overseas education. I just don’t feel comfortable clicking those links in the chat boxes and key in my payment details, like my sister-in-law often does without much concern. It’s not that people feel so safe in online transactions. Electronic fraud is rampant in this country. Police often warn people of international fraud organizations and their schemes. Yet people still click on random links unsuspiciously. My brother, a university professor, was scammed of $5,000 just by a text message reminding him to top up his highway ETC account. The police took his case but he never got his money back.

The Chinese authorities are launching increasingly tougher measures to crack down electronic fraud. People take it as consumer protection. But the most common methods we can see are more surveillance and more blocking. Like when I first got my phone and tried to set it up, all the apps for banking/payment, transit, shared bicycles, online shopping require the user to submit ID for verification, not just their information, but the image of the holder holding up the ID, along with steps of various facial scans. For me, it’s even harder because I don’t have a Chinese national ID card, only my Canadian passport. The interfaces are mostly defaulted to take Chinese IDs only. Navigating to submit foreign ID documents is misleading and frustrating at the very least. Most often customer support is just a chat box by default, with no real human being answering. I thought this front-end setup was the hardest part and I could enjoy all the exciting conveniences once everything is up and running. My nightmare just started. One day, I log my WeChat onto my laptop’s browser, for easier typing and messaging. Within a few minutes, an error message pops up, “Your WeChat is being used for potential fraud. Your account is blocked. Please contact customer service to unlock your account.” With no option such as “if this is you, please log off within the next xx seconds”, my account is frozen instantly. Ironically, Tencent, the company behind WeChat, one of China’s largest telecommunications companies, doesn’t have real people customer service. Their chat box keeps rerouting me back to entering my Chinese ID, which I don’t have. I’ve just linked my bank account to this app! Desperate, I try to enter my Canadian passport, only get blocked, “You have attempted too many times. Please try again after 24 hours.” Flash forward to two days later, it takes my sister-in-law’s phone number, ID card number, and her linked bank account, as guarantor, to unlock my WeChat! Later I realize, it’s the VPN on my laptop. When I connect my WeChat to it, the two devices show different IP addresses. The Chinese government is cracking down on streaming farms, where people use VPNs to route multiple phones to falsely boost up their channels’ traffic. There are also possible frauds associated with this kind of practice.

I’m definitely not running a streaming farm. I use VPN for work, as I need to access Google and Western content on a daily basis. And they are all unavailable in China. I have no intention of breaking the country’s firewall laws, nor do I want to offend its censorship scheme. I just still want to connect with friends and families outside of China on social media like Facebook. And I know for a fact that using VPN or “wall jumping” is common in China, though it’s considered a criminal offence. So I’m in this constant cat and mouse game between “wall jumpers” and mammoth national surveillance machine.

Wait, doesn’t all this feel like being with mom again? Since I’m back, worrying about her elder son has been one of her major daily activities. Like she always insists on making sure I wear a mask whenever I go out, even though the mandatory mask order has been lifted for a long time. And every time I do, she’d come to the door, watch me put on the mask, bring my cell phone and keys, before helping close the door. She even wants me to WeChat her whenever I arrive at my destination and what time I’m coming back. In my fifties, I’m no longer a rebellious teenager, and I know I’m back in Beijing to support her, so I have to try my best to be a good mama’s boy again and oblige.

I want Western content not because I find Chinese content boring. In fact, I’ve become so addicted to it I have to “balance” my content diet. Short videos are all the rage on all social media platforms: WeChat, Bilibili, RedNote, Douyin (TikTok). It’s amazing one can see how much Chinese young people know about the West but also misinterpret it with much Chinese populism. Most times such misinterpretation is intentional, solely for the sake of hyping traffic. Even with all the censorship and policing, Chinese social media contents are so entertaining it often leaves foreigners flabbergasted. If you know the Chinese language, you’d see and hear as much racism as you’d do in any other country, if not more; as much divide on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza; as much homophobia, or even more; as much obsession with AI and Elon Musk like he’s the saviour of mankind. And I find it unfathomable that there seem to be even more MAGAs in China than in Canada and America combined! With Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51^st state of the US, some Chinese friend even congratulates me that I’d become American soon enough! Most of such contents I wouldn’t call creative, but they are so addicting, often I find myself glued to the cellphone screen, watching things from unsavoury to outrageous yet unable to stop.

Most of the Westerners who have visited or even lived in China would recognize that technologies in this country are much more advanced than most Westerners would like to admit. It's not just the technologies themselves, but more about the way people (and the government) adopt them. The Chinese seem to be much more willing to adopt new techs in their lives, even though they might still have multiple issues. People tend to see them as leading trends into the future and are anxious more about FOMO than worrying about their downside. When Big Data was all the buzz, Chinese companies and governments were quick to deploy it in many facets of society, from business to media, from services to manufacturing, from government to policing. The Chinese are more enthusiastic about the disruptions than worried, though concerns of job losses do exist.

It seems that in China everyone is eager to jump on the tech bandwagon, no one likes to be judged as “out-la” – out of time, out of fashion. Now with the rise of DeepSeek, AI is all the buzz, with extra shots of national pride. And circumstances such as the pandemic make their implementation even faster. Many of the deployments of such technologies are led by or under the auspices of the government. The Chinese people seem to be fine with leaving their privacy with the government. They don't see government as a necessary evil for governance as we see it in the West. They see government as the protector of their interests, though sometimes tough love has to be applied, just like parents disciplining their children. I know I'm a good boy, I wouldn't do anything to upset my mom, even though I'm annoyed by her incessant nagging.

A year flies by in China like I have just gone to a blockbuster sci-fi movie. I walk out of the cinema, with all the plots and effects still buzzing in my head, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. As I exit the Toronto Pearson Airport, I suddenly realize, I've left my wallet in Beijing.