In China it may be said that what is generally regarded as the political domain is actually often subservient to a much larger concern – the eco-nomic domain. In the vast transformations of the past century, whether first to communism or later toward modernity and reform, the effective mode has been via economic transformation. China’s economic reforms, implemented by Deng Xiaoping following the death of Chairman Mao, have brought unprecedented change to the country. While these reforms represent the adoption of a number of the elements of capitalist market economy, they were always billed as being ‘socialism with spe-cial Chinese characteristics’ (zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi). The phrasing allowed the implementation of sweeping economic and social reform without having to directly acknowledge the large- scale abandonment of many of the socialist ideals of the past.
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This remarkable economic transition extends right down to Anshan Town itself, where being industrious, doing business and earning money are major parts of people’s lives and are seen as being extremely desirable personal qualities. This attitude was reflected in the previous chapter in the discussion of how the entrepreneurial ethic came to be expressed online on social media. A large number of farmers are actively engaged in the market economy. Many sell high- priced fruit and surplus crops that they have grown. Many farmers (mostly male) preferred to work as manual labour in the town’s factories in order to earn more than they might do working in agriculture, leaving their wives responsible for tending vegetables for most of the year (in addition to the considerable burdens of housework). Through this employment, the factories made a significant contribution to the local economy. The town itself was full of retail outlets, selling everything from groceries to clothes to motorcycles. Anshan Town residents were, in many ways, acutely aware of their participation in the regional, national and global economies. A proportion of internet users also sought to extend their entrepreneurial ethic to their use of social media. The previous chapter looked at users for whom this took the form of level accumulation; for others it involved trying to extend their business activities into online spaces.
Social media for promotion
There were already instances of small businesses in Anshan Town, such as restaurants and shops, using social media within their everyday oper-ations, although using social media as a channel to promote their activ-ities was altogether less common. Neither Qzone nor WeChat have the ability to easily create business pages35 in the same way that Facebook offers. One user, Li Ming, who runs a restaurant in the town, set his per-sonal profile name to that of his restaurant. For a period, his WeChat profile picture was a photograph of his restaurant storefront. Li Ming hoped that by doing this, people who were visiting the town might see his WeChat profile online via the ‘People Nearby’ function, and if they happened to be looking for somewhere to eat, they might contact him and then come for a meal. He explained that since he had set up the profile, one or two people had, indeed, become aware of his restaurant this way and had come to eat at his restaurant. However, he expressed disappointment that his online presence had not elicited more custom.
Li Ming eventually gave up on this approach, instead using an image of himself as his profile picture.
Another example was Gao Jianguo, who ran a photocopy/ print-ing shop within the town. Like Li Mprint-ing, Gao Jianguo also set his QQ alias as his company’s name and used an image of his shop front as his profile image.36 In the case of Gao, social media was more immediately relevant to his business. Although most people came directly to the store in order to print things off, usually armed with a USB key con-taining the relevant files customers also sometimes sent him the files for printing via QQ. QQ was thus used as a business page in order to aide communication and to increase visibility to potential customers.
There were also instances of people using social media platforms themselves to sell specific products. One example is a woman whose father was a retired carpenter. Her home featured a beautiful bed that her father had made by hand. She placed an advert on her Qzone con-taining a photo of the bed, saying ‘if anyone is interested in buying one call me on this number . . . ’. One small company in the town that spe-cialised in selling steel to the town’s factories for use in the manufac-turing process attempted to promote their business through WeChat group messages. The company used the group message function to regularly send the wholesale prices of metal (i.e. per tonne) to buyers in each of the factories to keep them updated on changing prices.
All three of these examples show the willingness of townsfolk to utilise social media platforms for their own business purposes. For these small local businesses, social media was the preferred way to both pro-mote one’s business and to communicate with customers. However, per-sonal accounts and business accounts were often indistinguishable from one another, again reflecting the fact that personal relations were seen to form an integral part of business relations.
Taobao
As already noted, there are very strong links between the development of social media sites more generally and that of Taobao, a popular online shopping website that operates in a similar way to Amazon Marketplace.
For a 1,000 RMB ($161) returnable deposit, it allows people to set up their own store where they are able to sell products. In some ways the overlap with more conventional social media is more apparent than it is with Amazon Marketplace because Taobao has a strong social element to it. It features a chat client called ‘Prosperous Ali’ (a’li wangwang), which allows potential customers to chat directly with store owners. Rather than customer – storeowner dialogue on Prosperous Ali being confined to issues of post- sale customer support, a significant amount of dialogue
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is conducted prior to the sale. Many sellers receive messages from cus-tomers prior to purchase checking whether they have a particular item in stock, and customers will often attempt to negotiate a discount on the listed price.
During the field work I only met one woman in Anshan Town, Wang Miao, who operated her own Taobao store. Wang Miao was a Chinese medicine doctor in the town’s hospital; however, she also ran a small clothes shop in Anshan Town, selling children’s clothes in part-nership with her sister. Her online Taobao store also sold clothes, how-ever in contrast with the actual store she operated in Anshan Town, none of the clothes on her online store were actually owned by her.
Instead, she acted as an agent, selling on clothing for another person who was located in another city in China. Each time Wang Miao made a sale on her online store, she messaged the person, who fulfilled the order and electronically transferred a small portion of the profits to Wang Miao’s account. The person who fulfilled the order had their own online store on Taobao; however by having multiple stores offering their products, the main seller increased the potential range of people who could receive such offers. Nonetheless, Wang Miao reported that sales through this channel were minimal, and towards the end of my field work she closed her online store, as she felt it required too much time to maintain.
In contrast to selling online, buying from Taobao is common among Anshan Town people. Over the period of field work shopping via Taobao became an increasingly popular activity. One of the major transitions was the opening of a ‘Taobao assisted buying shop’ on the town’s Commercial Street during the field work. The shop, run by a local family, served to reduce two barriers that discouraged townsfolk from buying online: the expense of getting items delivered, and the lack of trust involved in conducting online transactions with strangers.
The opening of the ‘Taobao assisted buying shop’ broke the monopoly on delivery services held by the town’s Post Office. Prior to the store opening, the Post Office (operated by China Post, the state Post Office) was the only officially recognised parcel delivery service.
In contrast, large cities offered greater choice, with several private couriers offering delivery that is both cheaper and faster than China Post. These courier companies are able to offer superior service by lim-iting their coverage to cities and large urban towns, such as Bai Town.
By not offering delivery to smaller, poorer places such as Anshan Town (where there are fewer customers posting items, and fuel and delivery costs are high), the couriers keep their overheads to a minimum. The
‘Taobao assisted buying shop’ services the final stage of the delivery process – between Bai Town and Anshan Town – which the couriers had deemed to be unprofitable. Each day the shop owners drive to Bai Town, visiting the delivery offices of each courier company and pick up all packages destined for Anshan Town. On return to Anshan Town, recipients are called and told to pick up their goods from the shop on the town’s Commercial Street. The courier companies pay the shop 1 RMB ($0.16) for each item they deliver. For the residents of Anshan Town, being able to pick up their items from the store in Anshan Town is far preferable to travelling to Bai Town to pick up the package in person.
The ‘Taobao assisted buying shop’ offers a further convenience for users, helping them to make the purchases in the first place by providing a way for users to overcome issues of trust. Customers can use one of two computers located in the store to browse through the Taobao site them-selves, and to select goods for purchase. The store owner helps to intro-duce users to the site and provides guidance on how to talk to the seller using a’li wangwang to negotiate a discount. Furthermore, instead of paying using their own credit cards or online bank accounts, customers were able to pay the Taobao store in cash (for a percentage fee of the total cost of the product). The store owner then used their own bank account to pay for the items. Many of the people who made use of the store’s assisted purchasing service tended to be young people, mostly middle school students and young mothers. Visitor numbers swell during the school’s break and lunchtimes, when students from the school opposite visit to make purchases. These people often do not have bank accounts, or do not trust online purchasing, so have not yet activated this feature of their bank account.
The storeowner keeps a record whenever they buy items on behalf of customers, so that when the package arrives they know who to pass it on to. Examining this record revealed the low value of many items purchased. Of a random selection of 44 different items purchased by 15 different customers, the average item cost was 33 RMB ($5), with the most and least expensive individual items costing 6 RMB ($0.96) and 178 RMB ($29) respectively. The majority of items purchased through the store were clothes, shoes and accessories.
In this case, it was the familiarity of the local owner of the Taobao store that helped to allay users’ fears around conducting online trans-actions with strangers. The store owner was as a member of a known family from the town, and therefore users were happy to conduct trans-actions through this individual, even if the end user was not known.
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In this economic arena the particular character of Chinese social media seems to find its niche. In China there is always a duality between the social and the economic and a preference for a more socialised form of exchange, which may explain why people seem to be increasingly willing to spend their money on these platforms. There is also increas-ing willincreas-ingness to try to make money out of online platforms, as evi-denced by Wang Miao’s online clothes store and both Li Ming and Gao Jianguo’s use of social media profiles to promote their businesses within the town itself. It is worth noting how this is the opposite of the impact of the internet on commerce in the West, where sites such as Amazon rep-resent a further de- socialising of commerce when compared to offline shopping.37