by Xiaowei Wang
Peppa Pig is a symbol co-opted by shehui ren, a recent term coined on livestream, that translated literally means “society person.” “Society person” describes the bulk of Kuai’s demographic: people who are unable to live the shiny, upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements throughout China. While the transience of livestream and internet subculture gave rise to the Peppa Pig meme, the ethos her movement espouses is decidedly dangerous. Peppa’s status as a subversive icon can be traced to one online short video in which someone displays a large back tattoo of Peppa Pig.
A movement coalesced around Peppa Pig, crystalizing a careless nihilism and rejection of mainstream values. Like in so many other countries, consumption has become the sacred value of daily life in China. The narrow path laid out by authority figures and parents is to get good grades to go to a good school, go to a good school to get a good job, and with a good job, shop, have kids, and shop some more. Instead of abiding by this prescribed life, shehui ren have no desire to enter the competitive whirl of school and employment; they see through the expectations of society. And the government sees this kind of nihilism as troubling, both socially and economically.
As a result, Peppa Pig memes were deemed lewd and inappropriate and subsequently removed as part of an “online cleanup” by government censors in the spring of 2018. Censors and state sources explicitly cited Peppa Pig’s shehui ren culture as leading to antisocial behavior, “which could potentially hamper positive societal growth.”6 Fortunately, children were still allowed their beloved Peppa cartoon on official state channels.
This is the subversive potential of Peppa Pig memes and shehui ren culture. Videos from shehui ren still proliferate on livestream and other platforms. Shehui ren culture is not unique to China in its youthful anxiety about the future in a time of economic precariousness and astronomical housing prices worldwide. The glimmers of hope promised in the 1990s are now fading, with young people in China subject to enormous economic burden and only an illusory chance at the Chinese Dream. Many turn to Kuai as a place to bond and let off steam, and, for some, as a place to try to strike it rich as livestream stars.
One researcher, Yang Yuting at Beijing Normal University, has studied the culture of shehui ren in depth. Yuting explains that the Peppa Pig livestream meme was a culture developed around shared experiences throughout the country. With promises of middle-class stability unmet and increasing income inequality, young people rallied around the cry of “Shehui, shehui!” or “Society, society!” In everyday Chinese parlance, to be part of society (rong dao shehui, 融到社会) is what a moral, upstanding citizen desires. Online shehui ren culture parodied and mocked this normative sentiment. Yuting says that self-declared shehui ren are united against all the conventionally defined markers of being a good citizen. Shehui ren don’t care about stable jobs, shehui ren don’t care about the future, shehui ren are unproductive members of society, some refusing to get married and reproduce. For many shehui ren, a life or a business can be built on stealing or copying. Shehui ren live starkly against the everyday material life of glossy, happy ads on TV.
Street smarts are important for shehui ren—in order to hun shehui, or get by in society, as Zhao put it. Hun shehui involves stringing together jobs between the cracks of “respectable” society. From reselling fake Chanel perfume to livestreaming karaoke, there’s nothing wrong with your chosen line of work when you’re simply trying to live. Shehui ren are scoffed at by urban elites as crass and uneducated. But shehui ren couldn’t care less what you think about them.
Despite the antisocial behavior of shehui ren, there remains the tinge of hope that if you can string together enough jobs, run enough scams, hustle hard enough, you can make enough money to become the boss of your own life, to play the system itself. Just like Zhao’s dream.
In a small town outside of Chengdu, I make friends with a woman named Nicly who runs several housing rentals. She’s eager to become friends with me because I’m American, maybe wealthy, and maybe I could bring her business. Every day she sends me a sticker on WeChat, calling me jie (姐, sister). I page through her WeChat and her Kuaishou. She is a shehui ren, her livestream feed filled with videos of face masks she’s selling. Clicking through, I find one video where she talks about her current hustles and how others can learn from her. Sometimes hun shehui is more important than school, she says. It’s lame and boring to just go to school and hope you’re going to get somewhere through conventional means. Plus, the chances are low: those who are already well-off had well-off parents. It’s better to rely on yourself and your street smarts. She tells everyone that she used her street smarts, and last year she managed to buy a car. The video has 1.2 million likes.
7.
In my hand, I hold a can of formaldehyde with a dead oyster floating inside. Before I leave Zhuji, Lisa explains the process for making a wish pearl. First, a large triangle mussel is inoculated with small plastic balls. A coat of lacquer is allowed to form over a year—much less than the standard five years for a quality pearl. Each triangle mussel produces thirty to forty pearls. Since the excitement of a pearl party is in the opening up of an oyster that has one or maybe two pearls, the pearl farm takes small, cheap oysters, opens them up, and transfers one of the original pearls from the large mussel into the smaller oyster. This small oyster is now a wish oyster. Lisa told me that if I wanted, I could custom order pearls to be dyed all sorts of colors before being inserted into the smaller oyster. This is because pearl party hostesses often like to announce what each pearl color symbolizes—luck, happiness, or friendship. Each oyster is worth less than RMB 5.
Shipping is a drag, explains Lisa. One method the companies in Zhuji have been trying is vacuum sealing the small oysters individually. Before vacuum sealing, the oysters are soaked in formaldehyde, a slightly carcinogenic chemical that stings and smells bad, preserving the dead flesh and preventing rot. Another chemical, which Lisa doesn’t remember the name of, is used to make sure that the small oysters remain closed—after all, an open oyster signals a dead oyster, and the whole point of a pearl party is to shuck ones that look alive. While vacuum sealing has been successful in cutting down on shipping costs, the weight of hundreds of oysters leads to occasional crushing. Another method is to ship the oysters in cans of formaldehyde. Kristie’s Krazy Kultured Pearl Parties uses oysters preserved by this method, I observe, as one evening Kristie remarks that her hands sting from the stinky oysters. I can’t smell through the screen, and that’s probably why this pearl party illusion through livestream works so well.
I know there are other things I can’t tell through the screen, but I’m tempted to buy one, just to hear Kristie say my name, to wish me happiness and joy, to watch the screen fill with comments congratulating me on my pearl-chase. I wonder if Kristie knows where the pearl came from, what she thinks of Zhuji, of China in general. During one party, over the awkwardness of video, she stares blankly into the screen, seemingly unaware of being broadcast, wearing a pearl necklace. She’s wide-eyed, with skillfully applied makeup, the kind of makeup I wish I had the talent to do.
In Lee Edelman’s book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, he provokes readers to think about a set of impossible politics, a theory of failure. While conventional politics are defined as the push and pull between the left and right, he insists that most of us end up creating a culture where political action is premised on the illusory figure of “the Child.” The call to act is haunted by the specter of “our children,” whether it is a future of environmental destruction or a disorderly future without “traditional values.” We are always trying to live for the child that does not yet exist, fixing the world for our children who do, impressing our expectations on their desires. These political visions draw upon fears of decline or loss of control, on an innate need to crave a future—some kind of story or meaning that motivates us to keep living. This same need is the reason why we get stuck in a cycle of chasing after the future, a future that never appears as pe
rfect as we imagined it to be.
The only way out, Edelman suggests, is to declare an end to the future—a rallying cry for “no future.” By definition, it’s a kind of release, perhaps a Buddhist nirvana.
The future has been sold to all of us, not just the shehui ren of Facebook Live or Chinese Kuai, as a lottery, a glint of happiness or a threat of catastrophe. And while I don’t see myself as a shehui ren who pushes against the broader system, the more livestream I watch, the more I wonder: What is the point of respectability, of living for imagined futures? Figures prance across my phone screen: young men in the countryside of China, elderly grandparents with no teeth watching their grandsons moonwalk and sell acne cream. Kristie singing another round of “Like a Pearl-Gin.” Desire and future becoming one, into a desperation I can feel.
I think of my parents, my grandparents. My grandmother and her nightmares, how the last few years of her life were marked by her confronting the depth of her past, despite having lived for the future in her youth. My mother’s insistence on a better life, as she defined it, full of expectations for her children’s future that neither my sister nor I was able to fulfill. Her fingertips, cracked and dry from working, saving for a life that she felt was not hers. Why do I work long days to dutifully pay off the five-figure student debt I have, the debt I took on in fantasizing about a better life? Even if I paid off the debt, would the debt-free future that awaited me be as perfect as I imagine?
I think I keep showing up every day for the same reason Kristie and Nicly do. A sense of purpose, a sense of being needed. A community, no matter how small. I dutifully take the BART ride from the East Bay to San Francisco every day, to a beautifully generic office filled with standing desks and Aeron chairs. I show up despite knowing that the only thing my time and labor amount to is making rich men richer. The best parts of work are the interactions with other people, and even conflict gives a sense of community. I spend more time with my coworkers than with friends or partners. My daily life is either sleeping or working. It’s like having a family, but I wonder if this is the family I would actively choose. And on evening BART rides back home, I listen to music in my headphones, watching other people with startup-logo-embroidered backpacks scroll vigorously on their phones, smirking and laughing at the screens. I am still left with a sense of loneliness. Kristie’s next pearl party awaits me at home, along with a box of Green Chef and some packages from online New Age boutiques.
Maybe that’s just a microcosm of the difficult work that we want to skip: the work of building a community upheld by boundlessness and belonging, a sense of purpose beyond reducing work and life to simple economics. I think of the Peppa Pig meme and how strong a new community’s culture can grow, aided by symbols. It’s easy to mistake the power of the Peppa Pig meme as simply resulting from the internet. But culture and community, not technology, are the driving force behind its power, its threat to the elite. As internet researchers such as An Xiao Mina and sociologists have shown, the driving force behind broader sociopolitical change has always been culture, with or without the internet.7 Cultural change comes before political change, and that cultural change starts with us. It is up to us to make meaning, to make new symbols.
In recent years, visioning exercises have come into vogue. The internet is saturated with these little moments. The idea behind this visioning is simple. If you just close your eyes and imagine your future in great detail, you will manifest it. In this kind of magical-thinking exercise, the word “manifest” seems easy, as if your dream of more money, more friends, and fame will just suddenly come into existence.
One of the memes circulated on a Facebook pearl group says, in a quirky cursive font: “Close your eyes, think of the future, what do you see?”
Instead of dreaming of the happy day when I’ll have paid off all my student debt, the happy day when doctors manage to find a cure for my progressive, incurable disease, the happy day when I’ve saved up millions to buy a house in the San Francisco Bay Area, I am exhausted trying to conjure a blurry future. A dream that is peddled as a future filled with total ease.
A few days before the start of a new decade, I sit at a quiet terrace bar in Hong Kong as dusk falls. The city has become a world of strange contrasts, with riot police standing guard outside cosmetic stores as people buy mascara, and police violence against protesters in luxury shopping malls. Banks and stores associated with the Chinese government have been shuttered; storefronts protectively shrouded in plaster are covered in protest graffiti. Reports of a new zoonotic disease from mainland China causing flu-like symptoms in humans has added to the city’s unease, the memory of SARS still recent. The tropical air smells faintly sweet, laden with the figures of Hong Kong’s colonial past and the decline of empire. I try the exercise posted on the Facebook page. I close my eyes. Stillness washes over me, like embers that quietly glow in the middle of this restive metropolis.
I stare into the darkness that shifts with occasional washes of light. I cannot bring myself to see the honeyed visions of a comfortable future. Instead, I see the intrinsic truth of living as one of difficulty, the constant effluent of change. Without a future, I must give myself over to the present, to undertaking the work that must be done.
It’s easy in the moments of stillness, somewhere between getting home exhausted and opening up my laptop again to watch yet another video, to sense that there are other paths. I sense there is something past ardent nationalism and total technological bliss, something past endless scrolls and lonely rage, past the floating world and ceaseless talk that skims across the surface like foam. Both nationalism and technological optimism mark the ways yearning and desire are exploited. They fall away in stillness. Governments drum up nationalist support, promising stability and control over our futures. Tech companies capitalize on this nationalism. Sunny ads promise frictionless prediction and control, a reassuring probability of a safe world, where refrigerators can order food delivery and happiness is guaranteed forever. A new strain of tech progressivism is equally insistent in our political and social lives, promising that, if we can only efficiently scale up our political actions and movements, if we can only optimize our good deeds, we will achieve the future that we all want. It’s that easy. But I am less curious about this stifling singularity and more curious about the revealed state of “interbeing”: a term the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh uses to replace the simple binary of being and nonbeing.
I continue to stare. The present stares back. The present moment promises nothing—it only demands. It demands building the communities that shift culture, that allow interbeing to thrive. It demands the work of awareness and care, instead of the tools of efficiency and scale. It demands seeing individual freedom as nothing more than a way for all of us to be oppressed. Most of all, the present demands the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting. Through the present moment I see the glimmers of liberation embedded in the work we must do at this time. Because what else can we do?
Notes
1. Ghosts in the Machine
1. Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea (Digireads.com, 2019).
2. Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
3. Zhihong Zhang, “Rural Industrialization in China: From Backyard Furnaces to Township and Village Enterprises,” East Asia 17, no. 3 (September 1999): 61–87.
4. Eric Holt-Giménez, “Part 1: The Agrarian Transition,” interview by Tracy Frisch, EcoFarming Daily, https://www.ecofarmingdaily.com/the-agrarian-transition/.
5. C. Cindy Fan, “Why Rural Chinese Are in No Rush to Settle in Cities,” Nikkei Asian Review, July 27, 2017, https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/C.-Cindy-Fan-Why-rural-Chinese-are-in-no-rush-to-settle-in-cities. See also: The Institute, Inc., “The Chinese State, Local Communities, and Rural Economic Development,” special issue, Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultura
l Systems and World Economic Development 41, no. 2/3/4 (Summer/Fall/Winter 2012).
6. An Chen, “How Has the Abolition of Agricultural Taxes Transformed Village Governance in China? Evidence from Agricultural Regions,” The China Quarterly 219 (2014), 715–35, https://doi.org/10.1017/S030574101400071X.
2. On a Blockchain Chicken Farm in the Middle of Nowhere
1. For more information, see Guobin Yang, “Contesting Food Safety in the Chinese Media: Between Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony,” The China Quarterly 214 (May 9, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741013000386.
2. 韩长赋, “任何时候都不能忽视农业忘记农民淡漠农村 (深入学习贯彻习近平同志系列重要讲话精神),” Renmin Daily, August 13, 2015, http://web.archive.org/web/20170223093119/http://politics.people.com.cn/n/2015/0813/c1001-27453126.html.
3. 黄哲程, “探索区块链在食品安全领域的运用, 新京报,” Beijing News, November 4, 2019, http://web.archive.org/web/20200317213627/http://www.xinhuanet.com/food/2019-11/04/c_1125189022.htm.
4. Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg, Policy Making in China: Leaders, Structures, and Processes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
5. “Garrett Hardin,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/garrett-hardin.
6. Similar concepts, like “survival of the fittest,” based on Darwin’s ideas of natural selection, give scientific credence to economic systems like capitalism—with its aggressive emphasis on competition. Survival of the fittest has been similarly disproven. The biologist Lynn Margulis has shown that the major driving force behind evolution is symbiosis, not natural selection.
