Early in my time in China, my Chinese language teacher introduced me to some of the pithy idioms (成语, chéngyǔ) that are an ancient part of the language. These are usually four characters long and express a great deal of meaning very succinctly and very poetically. Many of them come from or refer to ancient Chinese literature. One of the idioms my teacher taught me was the phrase 画蛇添足 (huà shé tián zú), to draw a snake and then add feet. It’s used when something is added superfluously or in a way that damages or detracts from the intended effect.
I was reminded of this idiom today as I reflected on how, in the pursuit of modernity, some things in Canal Town have become unnecessarily complicated. The Yangtze River Delta, and especially the province where Canal Town is located, is one of the wealthiest areas in China. This province is home to many of China’s tech giants, and it loves to show off its technological prowess and sophistication. Everything has to be digitised, electrified, turned into an app, or have a label stuck on it that says it’s hi-tech. But unnecessary digitisation, or badly managed digitisation, just makes things slower and more complicated, with the side-effect of those big tech companies hoovering up ever more information.
This week, it was paying the rent on my apartment. In the old days (well, fifteen years ago) paying the rent meant withdrawing a large bundle of 100 RMB notes from the bank and handing it over to the landlord. In Beijing, I usually paid by debit card or bank transfer. In Canal Town, for the last couple of years the apartment management would send an email every quarter with a breakdown of that quarter’s rent and utilities, and I could pay by Alipay or WeChat Pay or by popping into the office with a bank card. But now they have a new system. First, I got a message from the apartment management on WeChat to say that I should log into their online platform and pay my rent there. The online platform is accessed through a mini-app on WeChat and is very non-intuitive to navigate. I logged on and clicked through to find my rent statement. Four separate items were listed, one for each month’s rent and one for water. I clicked on the first “pay” button. It told me a text had been sent to my phone. I waited. In due course, a text appeared. In the text, there was a link to click. I clicked the link. It sent me to Alipay, where I could enter my payment password and pay that item. I then had to go back to the online platform and repeat the process for all the other items. I complained to the management office and asked if we could go back to the old system. This, to me, is drawing a snake and adding feet.
My greatest bugbear of this type, though, is the rubbish bins at my apartment complex. When I first moved here, there were ordinary wheelie bins of the type you might see anywhere, conveniently positioned near the entrance to the building. Anytime I was going out I could just drop a bag of rubbish in the appropriate bin - ordinary rubbish, paper recycling, glass recycling and so on. Then they decided to go hi-tech.
Now, there’s a digitised rubbish station near one of the entrances to the complex. It has a couple of bins for non-recyclable rubbish and a couple for food waste. But the bins are locked in a grey metal container that looks like a leftover prop from a hidden corner of Star Trek: The Original Series, maybe something from the transporter room or the cargo bay. It has a touchscreen and six motorised hatches. You have to either scan a code or type in your phone number to get the hatches to open. The hatches open slowly and you wait impatiently, thinking how much faster it used to be when you could just chuck it in the bin on your way out the door. When the opening is big enough to shove your rubbish through, it weighs what you’ve added. (Every quarter you can get a reward for how much rubbish you’ve processed. When I went to pick up some of the special bin bags from the office, the lady there looked up my apartment and told me with a disappointed look that I had earned only five yuan.) Then you have to tap the touchscreen again to close it. Recyclable rubbish is in a whole other separate and even more complicated system of bins near the other gate. Drawing a snake and adding feet
I grumble about it every time I have to take out the rubbish, but when a friend from Beijing was visiting recently she was very impressed by the hi-tech bin system. She took photos. Where this province goes, she said, other places will follow. Our students, too, are often dazzled by the promises of digitisation. Last year, a couple of first-year civil engineering students came to interview me for a project. Their task was something to do with buildings of the future (I have no idea why they thought I might have anything useful to contribute). They talked about how they could design a smart building, a building that could detect the external temperature and the temperatures in all the rooms and so on, and not only adjust the air-conditioning or heating as required but also rotate the whole building for optimal shade or light. They talked about the building being able to detect when someone entered a room and turn the light on or off automatically.
I challenged them to think about what the weaknesses of such a building might be, and showed them some of the architectural developments based on natural self-cooling principles, like the famous Eastgate building in Harare. (I also told them the hoary old chestnut about NASA and the space pens, although I’ve learned to my chagrin that it’s actually a myth). But the insidious assumption that more hi-tech is better is deeply embedded, especially among those young engineering students.
I’m not a Luddite. I enjoy the ease and speed with which I can buy almost anything I want online in China now, and I happily order meals on an app when I don’t feel like cooking (though I don’t like the cost in terms of packaging). I’m happy to draw snakes, or to see others drawing snakes. I just don’t like it when my snakes are unfitted for their snakiness by the addition of superfluous appendages.
New to Canal Town? Start here for an introduction!
Miss my last post? Catch up below!