Streaming out of shanty towns for bigger dreams

Updated: 2018-12-21 07:36

(HK Edition)

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The live-streaming craze on the Chinese mainland has sent millions of 'left-behind' teenagers from the countryside scrambling in a virtual gold rush. Besides potential monetary gain, it has helped kill their boredom and put their lives under the spotlight. Luo Weiteng reports.

Two years ago, Zheng Tao was an unremarkable young man from Sichuan province in southwestern China.

His childhood friend, who would later assumed the role of the trusty cameraman and the backbone of their production team, introduced him to the live-streaming craze that had already caught on in the most populous nation on earth.

Their videos on the popular social-media platform Kuaishou, each less than one minute long, featured him mining in mountain vegetables, picking wild fruits and cooking farm-flavored dishes that gave viewers a glimpse of the rural scenery and countryside life in a hamlet where he was born and grew up.

Within months, the number of followers on his channel skyrocketed from dozens to the hundreds. For the first time, he had a taste of what fame is like.

Such an auspicious start put the man in his 20s among millions of Chinese live-streamers participating in a virtual gold rush.

Unlike Meipai and Douyin (known as TikTok overseas) sharing equal renown in vying for the honor of being the country's top video-sharing platform where posts tend to revolve around celebrity culture, fashion and fancy urban life, Kuaishou essentially offers an immediate window to ordinary people living outside the prosperous megacities, as well as in the smaller cities, towns and villages that over a billion Chinese call home.

Scrolling through the app feels like upholding a lively story mixed with soil, dialects and crude humor, and taking a glance at Chinese society in its grassroots form.

Kuaishou - loosely translated as "quick hand" in Chinese - draws more than 130 million active daily users and helps up to 10 million creators genuinely make a quick buck, Chief Executive Officer Su Hua told the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen last month.

The platform offers an alternative source of income to a big slice of the population who are at a disadvantage and left behind in China's unbridled economic and technological development.

More importantly, it offers one more choice of life.

Having fled a years-long tedious working life in factories in the coastal cities, Zheng embarked on his live-streaming journey not just for laughs or out of curiosity. Instead, the 20-something desperately wants to prove he's capable of "doing something different".

His parents were among China's first generation of rural workers who left their farms decades ago to work on assembly lines or construction sites and are now on the cusp of retirement.

When Zheng took the baton from his parents to be among the second generation of migrant workers, he just refused to replicate their old, dull stories.

"The new generation, which has become more immersed in urban life, and even grown up on the fringes of major cities without much experience in taking up farming, has a dream bigger than money," said Liu Kaiming, director of the Shenzhen Institute of Contemporary Observation.

Such a dream, ironically, could hardly be realized in the glitzy city where Zheng struggled to settle down, but appears to be made possible back in the rural hometown he tried to retreat from.

For years, the overwhelming wave of technologies and internet has not only shaped the perception of the world for the new generation of migrant workers, but also brought about all sorts of lusts from every part of the globe. Their eyes are opened, but they also get caught in the formidable chasm between the colorful virtual world portrayed by the internet and smartphones, and migrant workers' bleak and limited real-world choices, Liu said.

"When the dream clashes with the grim reality, the dream is always so vulnerable and fragile," Zheng lamented.

Dream is a magical word very much on Zheng's lips. However, having worked on the assembly line for more than two weeks, Ding Yan feels it is a luxury to let this word slip from her mouth. If there is any dream ahead, it must be the working lunch that could barely feed the starving laborers and the leisure time after toiling and moiling all day long.

By sheer chance, the white-collar worker from a Guangzhou-based foreign trade company has been sent to a partnered electronics factory on the outskirts for a month-long "special training".

This is a totally different world from the deluxe office building in the downtown she's used to getting in and out of.

At the first sight of her "factory colleagues", it's incredible that many of them, in their late teens, do not look much different from good-looking live-streamers seen on Meipai and Douyin.

Killing boring time

"Who would have thought they are chained to the production lines as dispensable tiny cogs in the vast manufacturing machine, watching their youth fade away with the monotonous drudgery of factory work?" Ding asked.

Ding was caught by surprise with an almost unendurable monotony in carrying out identical tasks around the clock. Workers are like robots, doing the same procedures on a production line, non-stop. Besides performing the same monotonous role day in and day out, there are long stretches of leisure, boring time to be killed after work and over the break.

As research from Chris Tan, an associate professor of anthropology at Shandong University, showed, some 88 percent of Kuaishou users have not attended university and a majority of them live in less-developed areas. Most users are found to be either unemployed or hold low-end jobs, with 70 percent earning less than 3,000 yuan ($435) a month.

The much-derided platform, in popular discourse, is depicted as a playground and wonderland for farmers and rural migrant workers, said Tan. From what Ding has seen, this may be largely true.

The industrial area itself is isolated from the outside world without any entertainment facility nearby. Workers punch in, punch out, and repeat the same cycle the next day. There is no freshness to things anymore.

Online short video platforms, including but not limited to Kuaishou and karaoke app WeSing, at least, deliver a respite and add a splash of color to workers whose lives are akin to a pool of stagnant water. They offer a major and, perhaps, sole way out to stave off the boredom and keep in touch with the outside world.

"The draw of Kuaishou and Douyin has become the most common addiction in the factory," Ding reckoned. "Some workers, who may not have much talent to showcase, even sneakily livestream their working lives on the platforms. Their tedious work, which may come as an 'eye-opener' to people from other walks of life, is the only thing they could offer to viewers."

Most "part-time live-streamers" in the factory, Ding noticed, do not think too much about making money from their videos - usually via receiving "digital rewards" purchased by fans with in-app currencies that could be redeemed in part for real money.

"They present their lives online, in a go-as-you-please manner, just to get to know more people," she noted.

Miles away in his impoverished hometown, Zheng recalled the final years of eking out a living in the dusty industrial city of Dongguan to the east of the Pearl River.

"When I walked down the downtown street, I always noticed one or two fresh-faced food delivery drivers, either wearing the deep blue T-shirts of Ele.me or canary-yellow of Meituan with its iconic kangaroo logos. They look plain, common and ordinary, but they are definitely the most unforgettable scenery. Each time I watched them melt into the chaos of the road, their weary eyes always moved me to tears," Zheng said.

"This makes me realize I'm unimportant and replaceable. I know once I leave, there'll be an awful lot of hard-working people scrambling to take over my job," he said.

"But either seeking riches here or heading back home, there should not be the only way out ahead."

There is a huge trade-off. Many full-time live-streamers may end up with a small fan base that could never be monetized.

But Zheng hoped more young workers could come to realize that the sheer power of technology and a booming internet economy will not only render their lives visible, even profitable, but also bring about more possibilities apart from living off the land and following their parents' path to enduring strenuous, low-paying jobs in factories.

An inspirational tale

Such a belief encouraged Zheng to make the voyage from factory back to village. His story may sound an inspirational tale for Wang Chengfeng, formerly a migrant worker at a Suzhou-based electronics factory for just two months.

It hasn't been easy work. Wang, who spent at least 12 hours a day standing by an assembly line, putting electronics parts together, speaks of the day-to-day grind that virtually makes human beings "flesh machines running without thoughts and dreams".

"The grueling hours are unbearable unless you don't treat yourself as a human being. The longer you work in factories, the dumber you would become, and the more difficult it will be to step out of the 'comfort zone'," he groaned.

"You're totally stuck in a rut, losing the capability to make progress and dream a dream. How can I live like this anymore?"

Thanks to a new breed of businesses nurtured by burgeoning e-commerce, Wang, born in 1993, now works as a delivery man for SF Express. Ding meets him quite often at the factory and happens to know he has learned traditional Chinese painting since childhood but failed in the national college entrance examination years ago.

"Does working as a delivery man really take an otherwise skilled traditional Chinese painter a step closer to his dream?" Ding wonders.

But Wang believes his current job, which is neither tiring nor stress-inducing, is "not bad".

"After all, I was given the freedom of choice."

Ding feels happy for this lucky dog. Yet, she does not shy away from the fact that the majority of young workers in the factory cannot even bear the thought of taking off their white factory uniforms and walking out of the gate ever and forever.

A boy, dressed in a T-shirt with "the hope of the whole village" written in the middle, always twitters excitedly about interesting videos on Kuaishou and Douyin, and what he wants to do in future.

Asked to delve further into his future plans and whether he regrets dropping out and working far away from home, he looked puzzled.

"My parents are factory workers, so are my fellow villagers. There's nothing strange for me to follow suit," he said.

A girl, whose parents and siblings all work at the factory, listened as her mother joined a discussion about "college education is the privilege for urban citizens and rich people", without uttering a word.

Asked if she would get tired and bored, she gently shook her head.

"The more you do the work, the sooner you'll get used to it," she said in a calm voice.

Ding believed it may go too far to ask young migrant workers to embrace a daring, near iconoclastic spirit of change, many of whom simply cannot afford making the decision.

"But the technological development and the live-streaming craze have put their lives under the growing spotlight. It's our society that should be reminded to give much care to those deemed good for nothing," Ding reckoned.

"Their precious years of youth should not be inundated with loud, clanking sounds of machines and the pungent smell of engine oil."

Contact the writer at

sophia@chinadailyhk.com

Streaming out of shanty towns for bigger dreams

(HK Edition 12/21/2018 page8)