What role does technology play for China's transition from a "low-trust" society to a potentially high-trust one?

A mini-travelogue

To date, the most popular article on China Translated is my essay on China’s “low-trust” society. My central thesis in that article is that Chinese people maintain a very low level of trust regarding strangers, and people are deemed “untrustworthy until proven otherwise”, rather than the “innocent until proven otherwise” verdict more commonly found in the West.

However, I also pointed out that China is changing too. People evolve, and cultures change in response to changes in the environment. Many of the core roots of China’s “low-trust”, including previous extreme poverty and resetting of social norms as a result of massive urban migration, have changed significantly over the years, so it’s only natural that the society-wide trust level in China has greatly improved from its low-trust base. I don’t think we are in a high-trust society yet, but we have come a long way. Perhaps we are a mid-trust society now, if that’s a thing.

Also relevant to this discussion last time was the role technology played in this transition. Does trust level naturally rise as a correlating function of economic development and rising standards of civility? Or, in the case of China, is technology the core enabler?

Today’s piece will come in the form of a travelogue on a small trip I took last weekend, and some small encounters I had, which I think may shed more light on the mechanics of this ongoing low-to-high-trust transition in China.

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I was in Beijing last week, and during the weekend, we went on a road trip to visit a section of the Great Wall that was submerged in the water, about a 3-hour drive east of Beijing. I travel with 2 companions whom I have known since high school, Mr. G and Ms. Y.

On our way there, we decided to make a stop at the 清东陵Eastern Qing tombs, where half of the Qing Dynasty’s royal families were buried, including many of China’s household names such as the Kangxi Emperor, the Qianlong Emperor, and Empress Dowager Cixi. It was also famous for a dramatic tomb-digging event by a Beiyang Warlord in 1928, when the gold and jewelry of Cixi and Emperor Qianlong were taken away, their bodies stripped of anything precious and tossed around like some random trash. For a history buff like me, this should be worth a visit.

It was supposed to be a fun and easy road trip. After about 2 hours of driving, shit-talking, and laughing, we managed to arrive at the Qing tombs. But while we waited to drive into the parking lot, a mini-accident happened. The Haval H6 right in front of us started to back up, but they didn’t notice us and drove not very slowly, so despite the wide distance between our two vehicles, despite me screaming in the shotgun seat and Mr. G pounding on the wheel, and right in front of the gigantic mausoleum area where dozens of Qing emperors and empresses buried themselves, that nasty Haval rammed into us.

All three of us scrambled outside. 5 people got off Haval, including 3 women and 2 men. The driver was a tall man with rash on his face. Looking confused, he seemed to be in his 60s, and all of his entourage looked a similar age to him. Retirees doing a weekend trip together?

We started to assess the damage. It was not serious. The front bumper of our SUV, an orange Tank 300 that we just rented in the morning, was squeezed, but the metallic frame didn’t seem to get hurt at all. Their vehicle was in an even better shape.

There was a silence for 2 minutes. And then, without consulting among ourselves, Y made a unilateral offer: “This damage didn’t seem too big. However, we don’t yet know how to assess the cost. How about this? We don’t need you to pay the cost now, but let me add your WeChat first. Should a cost arise in the future, we will notify you, and you can pay us then.”

This was an ill-advised offer. Even if we forget for a while the fact that this was not our own car but a rental car, and there is a standard procedure to handle events like this, Y obviously didn’t read the room carefully: the retiree party was clearly not on the same page with her.

“What do you mean?”

“WeChat?”

“We pay you the cost?”

“Why are we paying the cost to you?” The driver guy said it with a strong local Tangshan accent.

“Can’t you understand me?!” Y was about to explode, and I tried to calm her down.

The rash guy’s friend, a weasel-looking old man, chimed in: “It was YOU who bumped into us, why should we pay?”

At that moment, I realized what was going on. They were about to lie in broad daylight. Whatever my desire to negotiate with them instantly evaporated. Not just because I was not in the mood to negotiate with bad-faith people, but just in today’s China, it’s technically quite difficult to lie about something like that. I looked around, and there were surveillance cameras from at least 3 sides.

Aren’t they stupid, lying like this?

Since we were dealing with stupid people today, we can only deal with this in a stupid way. First, I placed a call to our rental company and asked for instructions. I was told that I need to call the traffic police first and ask for a Statement for Determination of Fault. Afterward, we should submit the Statement to our insurance company.

Sounds simple. So I called 122, China’s traffic police number, realizing this actually was my first time calling this number. A female operator at the local traffic police station picked up the call, and I spent one minute giving her the details. 20 seconds after she hung up, I received another one, this time from the actual traffic police officer. I explained to him what happened, and he replied to me with something in a strong local dialect. I couldn’t quite make it, but I heard he wanted me to give the phone to the other side. So I complied. The police officer spent the next 5 minutes talking to the rash-faced guy. Sometimes the phone was given to me again, but it was again really hard for me to make out his dialect. And the phone was passed to the rash guy again.

Gradually, I realized what the police officer seemed to suggest: He basically said if both parties agreed on what had happened, he didn’t even have to come but could just settle this thing remotely. But the rash guy still couldn’t agree to my version of the story. It was not an emphatic “no”, but rather a quiet rejection to say “yes”. To be more precise, he also looked a bit puzzled over what was going on. The policeman shrugged through the phone: So be it. I will come. However, be warned that it will take some time.

And so we waited. If we were in a major metropolis, I assumed it would take no more than 5 minutes for the officer to arrive, but because we were in a remote area of a county (Zunhua) of a 3-tier city (Tangshan), that wait was long. I think we waited for at least an hour. The sun was unforgiving, so the two groups of us spent the hour standing under the trees nearby, barely talking to each other. Ironically, because our two vehicles were left blocking one lane to the parking lot, I sometimes also acted as a temporary traffic guy to help redirect other cars to a nearby entrance.

Mr. G, fearing that this group would want to lie in front of the police too, was already looking for the workers at the parking lot to ask for surveillance camera footage. There was a woman working at the toll booth, and she told us the guy who could access surveillance videos on his phone was not available on that day, but she could try to reach him.

While we waited, a BMW with a Beijing car plate pulled up beside us. The driver was a middle-aged guy. Chewing melon seeds in his hands, he was waiting for his friends. He comprehended the situation quite quickly and was laughing at us.

“This is nothing serious. If it’s up to me, I will just spend a few bucks to settle this and move on to visit the tombs. Don’t waste precious time on these tiny matters.”

And so he repeated similar lines again and again, enjoying melon seeds as well as the spectacle of 8 of us standing stupidly in the shadows.

His words set off one of the old women. She started to berate us, and specifically me, brandishing her metal water flask at me: “It’s all your fault! It’s you who called the police, so we all had to wait here.” Her eyes were so angry that it looked as if she was about to eat me alive. The weasel guy was also muttering something about “settling this matter with money” on the side, all while forgetting that his strategy for negotiation involved blatant lying about what happened.

We didn’t answer their theatrics. By that time, we had already realized this standard procedure was what we should do. If it’s our car, we’d rather just settle it with a dollar amount, without even going into the trouble of talking to the insurance company, regardless of whether they lie or not. But since it’s a rental car, and since we can’t agree on simple facts, we will have to go through this boredom.

Finally, the traffic police came. There were two officers. They inspected our two vehicles for a few seconds and seemed to already know what had happened. They went straight to the rash guy.

“Dude, this is quite obvious. If you agree to what happened, we could settle everything online. If not, both of you will need to come to our police station on Monday, and we can settle it offline.” The rash guy stared at the officer; finally, he seemed to understand. And I believe it’s by that time he finally realized he didn’t have to pay anything out of his own pocket for this, but his insurance company would pay. “Oh, I never ran into a situation like this. I didn’t know what to do,” he said, with a little embarrassment on his face.

The police didn’t even bother to check the cameras, but the video footage also arrived. On the tollbooth woman’s phone, we saw clearly that there was quite a long distance between our two vehicles, and while our car stood still, it was their vehicle that was backing right into ours. But I was still intrigued by one detail: not only did the surveillance camera capture the car honking, but there were also sounds of people talking, possibly even some excited screaming.

“Who are the people screaming there? Were there people watching this camera while this accident happened?”

“It was your sound,” said the tollbooth woman.

I was shocked. Our windows were closed at that time, and there were at least 20 meters between our vehicle and the camera. To make something like this possible, the camera had to be perceptive and intelligent enough to not only target our vehicle but “pierce” it through as well. Holy s***! I didn’t know that technology is this advanced already, and frankly, even a little scared.

“Hey, you two, so this is settled. In a while, you will see the Statement on your 12123 app,” said the police officer. “It’s quite easy. If you haven’t already, just install the 12123 app, and you will see soon. Now, we need to take a picture of you two drivers.”

Thus, in front of the royal mausoleum of the Imperial Qing Court, the rash guy and Mr.G stood side by side, posing for the photo, as if they were two good old friends visiting this historical site. The scene was simply too comical, and all of us were chuckling by that time.

The generational shift

The confused rash-faced driver, the lying old weasel, and the flask-brandishing old lady: I don’t blame these people. The way they reacted was how I would expect them to if it were 20 years ago. In that low-trust society, most of the arguments between strangers would turn into a shouting match to test whose version of truth was the loudest - and I believe that’s exactly how they intended to approach this.

But such a shouting match becomes instantly meaningless when so many corners of society, both physical and online, are being recorded all the time.

This low-trust vs. high-trust issue has a generational dimension to it. The initial offer that Y made, giving up on compensation for now but only adding friends on WeChat just in case, made sense only if this incident had happened in Shanghai or Beijing, between people of similar age. But we were not in Shanghai, and so this offer only fell on deaf ears. It was as if Y was speaking a foreign language to them.

The young vs. old dichotomy is also highly correlated with tech-savvy vs non-savvy. When the policeman asked us to install the 12123 app, the rash guy struggled. So we offered to send them a screenshot of the Statement once we saw it on our phone. And he was honest about one thing: he really never had a car accident before (and he possibly just learned how to drive). This meant he had never called his insurance company before, so he struggled here again. Thus, another comical thing happened. In the end, it was we who helped them call their insurance company, explaining how their vehicle had run into ours. It’s like outsourcing all of your own work to your counterparty in a business transaction.

The world has changed, but those old people have not. But they have carried their old instincts forward into an era when things simply don’t operate in the way that they are used to.

Technology and trust

The link between technology and trust levels is a significant topic, and is at the root of the whole controversy about the so-called “social credit score”, a mythical Orwellian system exaggerated and fantasized by so many Westerners. I don’t think I have ever opined on this topic here at China Translated, so I will briefly make a comment about it.

The “social credit score” may be one of the most poorly understood issues, given its popularity in public discourses. Born and raised in China, and living in China for the last 15 years, I have never known what my “social credit score” is, and I struggle to understand exactly what Western commentators were referring to.

My suspicion is that an authentic recent development from the last decade was taken out of its broader context and misunderstood. And that big context is this: China had an extremely low-trust society to start with. In that low-trust society, people, frantic to get rich, frequently lied and cheated, mostly to strangers, but sometimes to friends and relatives as well.

Anyone living in this kind of environment knew that the situation needed to be improved; otherwise, it would only destroy wealth and grind business transactions to a standstill.

And so in this context, many proposals were adopted to make people trust each other more. For instance, the court system now operates a blacklist system for individuals who refuse to repay their debts, called “失信人名单The List of Untrustworthy People”. The people on that blacklist are not able to make high-value spending, such as traveling by air, traveling by high-speed rail, or living in a 5-star hotel. This blacklist, together with the fact that China doesn’t have a personal bankruptcy law yet, has created deepening derivative problems for entrepreneurship. But at least there is a blacklist! Before that, if someone just refused to repay what they owed, they would have zero penalty and could go on to borrow more from other unwitting lenders.

Private internet platforms also run their own systems. Any users of Alipay and WeChat Pay will have their own Alipay and WeChat scores, calculated based on their past record of respecting obligations. When your scores are high enough, you are allowed to borrow a portable powerbank, rent a shared bike, or open the doors of a vending machine without paying any deposit, something that’s totally impossible in China 20 years ago.

Can any of these technologies be abused? It’s possible. When in 2022 during the height of Covid lockdown, many bank depositors in Henan protested about fraud at a government-affiliated bank, the local government in Henan illegally placed a “Covid red code” on those protestors thereby restricting their movement. But the backlash against it was also immediate, and instead of tempering down the incident, the “red code” episode actually helped that protest turn into a national controversy. Eventually, the public outcry was so huge that the government was even “forced” to foot the bill for depositors, something they were actually not legally obligated to do.

What the 2022 Henan bank protests showed was that the Chinese public, in general, was quite sensitive about misusing technological infrastructure, and the boundaries of what technology should or should not do are being formed.

And the same public clearly enjoys technology’s benefit. It’s understandable for the Americans to attach Orwellian connotations to technology and surveillance. After all, freedom is what Americans care about the most. But that’s not the most important thing for most Chinese people I know, who tend to place more premium on safety, freedom from theft and robbery, and freedom from being lied to their faces by random strangers.

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I originally planned to finish this article about my trip itself, in the Qing tombs, the infamous robbery of Qianlong and Cixi’s tombs, and the Water Great Wall. It was an amazing weekend.

But do you wish me to bore you with that? Vote Yes if you want. I will only write about it if I gather at least 300 Yes votes.