Haishi He & Chris K K Tan. Chinese Journal of Communication. 2020.
Introduction
The advent of Internet technologies in China now affords the country’s Internet-users historically unprecedented access to information and entertainment (Fuchs, 2016). Since its launch in 2011, the WeChat messaging and social networking app has become a seemingly essential part of everyday life in China. Users can join groups based on common interests. Brands, companies, and news outlets can set up official accounts that users can follow, enabling such functions as content dissemination content, audience management, and online news syndication. In particular, after the integration of the WeChat Pay digital wallet function into the app in 2013, users can now pay their credit card, utilities, and phone bills; hail taxis; order food; and book hotels, movie tickets, and train and plane tickets online. WeChat runs applets, so users need not download more apps into their phones. These days, even panhandlers come equipped with quick response codes that passersby can scan to deposit money directly into their digital wallets (Lim, 2017). Indeed, these many functions make the app indispensable, even “super-sticky,” because the “average Chinese users are glued to the meta-platform whenever they use their smartphones” (Chen et al., 2018, p. 10).
The rise of WeChat enhances interests in platforms, the characteristics of which have already been extensively described for Western platforms (Helmond, 2015; Van Dijck & Poell, 2013; Van Dijck et al., 2018). They evidence the reliance of the WeChat ecosystem on both the app’s programmability (McKelvey, 2011) and its users’ participation (Langlois & Elmer, 2013). These traits ultimately showcase the “platform bundling” expansion strategy deployed by Tencent, the app’s parent company (Staykova & Damsgaard, 2016). WeChat is also both generative (Zittrain, 2008) and performative (Van Dijck, 2013); Tencent frames the interactions therein with controlled settings, but it cannot know the outcomes in advance.
In China, WeChat’s phenomenal success motivates research on specific aspects of the app, including the circulation of user-generated content (De Seta, 2016); the aesthetics of selfies (De Seta & Proksell, 2015); and how WeChat manipulates affects to capture the attention of its young users (Peng, 2017). Beyond this research, WeChat refines Horgan’s (2012) idea of strangership to account for the forms and imaginings of the stranger as revealed through ethnographic fieldwork (McDonald, 2018). Other apps piggyback off WeChat’s digital wallet function to extend social possibilities (McDonald, 2019). As part of China’s Internet infrastructure, WeChat has an explicitly techno-nationalist media regulations and an overt cyber-sovereignty agenda (Plantin & de Seta, 2019). Lastly, rural women use WeChat to align themselves with dominant sociocultural values by augmenting their offline experiences with online activities (Wang & Sandner, 2019).
Studies of WeChat sociality typically locate their research subjects in the cities (see McDonald [2019] and Wang & Sandner [2019] for exceptions). This urban bias obfuscates the social experiences of WeChat use for the 41 percent of China’s population that still resides in rural regions (World Bank, 2019). To address this lacuna, we present ethnographic data gathered from a village in Yunnan Province in southwestern China that we call “Longyue” (similarly, all names mentioned later in this paper are pseudonyms). Located in the remote mountains of Xishuangbanna in the extreme south of Yunnan, Longyue suffered from slow and unreliable phone and Internet connections until 2016 when the telecommunications company China Mobile built a 4G signal tower there.
The very recent introduction of improved information and communication technologies (ICTs) makes Longyue a prime site to examine WeChat’s social impact. The remainder of this paper shall proceed as follows: We first discuss the theories and literature about ethics, strangers, and strangerhood. We then move to analyze our fieldwork data, starting with a more detailed description of Longyue and the methods that we used. Here, we ask: How do Longyue villagers evaluate the app? With their new opportunities to contact the strange outside world, how will the villagers’ experiences speak to how we understand the figure of the stranger? The villagers opined that while WeChat improved their economic and social well-being by enabling contact with traders, friends, and family both inside Longyue and out, it also enhanced possibilities of extramarital affairs. Through gossip, we heard that married women had been dallying with outsider men, and at least one had been caught red-handed and publicly humiliated. Consequently, we conclude that while the villagers regarded WeChat with ethical ambivalence, their experiences do enrich the anthropology of strangership that McDonald (2019) calls for.
Of ethics, Strangers, and Strangerhood
Some anthropologists distinguish “morality” from “ethics.” Put simply, “morality” concerns social norms and their constraints (Fassin, 2012), while “ethics” includes the capacity to step back from the action and reconsider these norms (Laidlaw, 2014). For those who advocate the pervasiveness and ordinariness of ethical life, it has been crucial to explain how ethics can be reflective but not always in conscious awareness. Das (2015) offers an answer: Quotidian life is full of moments that create and destroy one’s moral universe; they may take anywhere from a few seconds to a whole lifetime to resolve. Research that resonate with this everyday ethical precarity includes that of obesity in Denmark (Grøn, 2017), and child-rearing in China (Kuan, 2015). Nonetheless, some matters remain ethically imprecise despite one’s considerations. Hence, for the rest of this paper, “ethical ambiguity” refers to people and circumstances that fall within this grey zone along the ethical/unethical divide.
Often, the figure of the stranger encapsulates our ethically ambivalence toward the unknown. He may be a fascinating source of vitality, or he may bring loathsome danger (Pitt-Rivers, 1968). Georg Simmel (1950 [1908]) famously theorizes the stranger as someone who is physically proximate but socially distant. We recognize individuals as strangers, because we encounter them in space. Consequently, strangers are not wholly Other, and the stranger’s Otherness is incomplete (Stichweh, 1997). Indeed, space constitutes the stranger’s peculiar social position (Horgan, 2012). This rendering now predicates much further thinking about the stranger. This figure can be a primary theoretical resource to examine both ethnic and cultural differences (Siu, 1952), and to develop Borgardus’s (1933) quantitative and much-criticized Social Distance Scale. More contemporaneously, social scientists use the stranger to frame discussions of cultural difference. This figure highlights race and its problems (Allen, 2004); immigration policies and patterns (Knowles, 2007); and the citizen/non-citizen binary (Marciniak, 2006).
Instead of presenting problematic differences that require elimination by assimilation, strangers can also be the “outsider within” whose inside/outside status critiques the existing order (Collins, 1986). In a globalizing world inhabited by ever-more newcomers, the stranger concurrently represents the potential destruction and expansion of our ethical capacities (Bauman, 1990). As the stranger increasingly becomes a universal condition (Bauman, 2004), the very question of who counts as a stranger already implies the existence of a social relationship. Rather than presupposing a strange/familiar binary, this question of recognition emphasizes how the “stranger” social category gets produced (Ahmed, 2000).
Working off the stranger’s inherent sociality, Horgan (2012) proposes more attention on strangership to shift attention away from the stranger as a social type to the relationships between strangers. While “strangership” itself is hardly a new concept, the term suffers from vague semantics; it appears in writings that range from biblical commentaries to theories of free market operations (Bonar, 1872; Mallory, 2012). While strangers are individuals who have been ascribed membership in a general category (Horgan, 2012), strangership makes for a generalizable form of relation whose properties are culturally structured (Alexander, 2003), made visible in social practices (Bourdieu, 1990), mediated by different contexts (Fine, 2010), and politically (de)legitimated (Noble, 2005).
Horgan (2012) envisions strangership as a social relation that concurrently produces and is produced by society. He outlines three basic conditions that work together to produce strangership. Firstly, strangership demands spatial and temporal co-presence; it involves at least two individuals in the same place at the same time. In turn, this co-presence requires an approach toward and an encounter between two persons previously unknown to each other to come into contact, even if this contact manifests as the two people ignoring one another.
Secondly, strangership requires the upkeep of mutually agreed social distance. By definition, strangers are unfamiliar to one another. As such, their relationship begins with them ascribing each other with membership in broad social categories (Simmel, 1950 [1908]). They must then orient to their differences as sufficiently significant. When civil inattention undergirds the urban social order (Goffman, 1963), people in strangerships mutually agree to social distance but not necessarily in equal measures (Horgan, 2012).
Lastly, strangership occurs when there is mobility. Here, mobility occurs across dimensions other than in the typical spatial sense (Horgan, 2012). For instance, social structural changes can bring about social mobility across boundaries, as people who remain unknown to each other become proximate in previously impossible ways. Here, one thinks of how the coffee houses of eighteenth-century Paris and London constituted early democratic public spheres (Habermas, 1991). Alternatively, symbolic mobility across boundaries can also produce strangership. Across different contexts, the recognition that one receives can vary according to the symbolic resources available and the statuses attributed to them (Honneth, 1996). Even if a person stays put and lives in the same place her whole life, the local context may undergo such radical transformation (from say, rapid gentrification) that she finds herself surrounded by strangers. Hence, symbolic mobility engenders strangership as much as spatial mobility (Horgan, 2012).
The universality of Horgan’s criteria restrains the concept’s usefulness for appreciating the vast possibilities that strangership encompasses (McDonald, 2019). In China, strangers are conceived as external opposition to kin, friends, and other relational categories. Almost a century ago, ideal rural relationality rested on the familiarity of kin; it radiated outward like concentric circles formed when a stone hit a lake, growing weaker with distance. Rural people kept to their own isolated social circles that excluded strangers (Fei, 1992). In early reform-era Beijing, guanxi (关系) connections introduce a clear mechanism to incorporate strangers: Invariably, two people meeting for the very first time will seek to establish some common grounds (Yang, 1994). Both of these accounts differ from Simmel’s, where the stranger’s attractiveness comes from the partial inversion of typical relations of “nearness” and “remoteness” (McDonald, 2019).
Must the stranger’s externality always be equated with the lack of relations? No, because traditional Chinese cosmology already contains the stranger within kinship relations. Here, while the gods are equated with earthly imperial officials, spirits can alternatively be regarded as dangerous stranger-ghosts or familiar ancestors, depending on one’s social position: One person’s stranger-ghost may very well be another’s familiar ancestor (Wolf, 1974). Marrying the stranger-ghost presents one way of domesticating its dangerous alterity (Tan et al., 2019).
More recently, massive internal rural-to-urban migration, increased contact with foreigners, and technological changes have all changed Chinese attitudes toward strangers. Unlike their elders, young people now regard rendering assistance to strangers as an ethical course of action, despite not intending to form lasting relations with these people (Yan, 2009). Urban Chinese also encounter strangers online regularly whenever they order food (Sun, 2019). Other similar encounters reveal how male virtual lovers hawk their affects as “real digital househusbands” (Tan & Xu, 2020), and how fans create new online publics (Zhang, 2016). These new cyber-publics afford different gendered uses. Nationalistic female “little pinks” (Fang & Repnikova, 2018) defend the Chinese government’s reputation online. For dating apps, people use Momo because they perceive it as less oriented toward marriage (Chan, 2019). Yet, as urban middle-class families increasingly hire rural-origin domestic helpers, the fear of extramarital affairs between bosses and helpers has also gone up (Sun, 2014).
Ethnographic Setting and Research Methods
Having discussed the theory that frames this research, we now move to examine our fieldwork data. Yunnan lies to the immediate north and northwest of Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. Although now part of China, Xishuangbanna has deep economic, historical, and cultural ties with the many ethnic groups that live across the border (Giersch, 2006). With its 184 inhabitants mostly of the Yao people from the Landian subgroup, Longyue is located 190 km away from the county seat at Jinghong. The few non-Yao residents married in from the surrounding settlements. The villagers reserve their limited flat land to cultivate rice for local consumption, and they grow sugarcane and bananas as cash crops on the hillsides. A single two-lane cement road, now severely potholed and crumbling in many places from the heavy trucks that carry these agricultural products away for sale elsewhere, links this once-isolated village to the outside world. These exports earn each household an average income of 15,000 RMB (2,100 USD) per year.
The first author conducted offline ethnographic fieldwork at Longyue in July and August 2018 and again in January 2019. Given the village’s small size, he managed to survey all the residents with a questionnaire that asked about their basic information and use of WeChat. With the exception of the elderly more than 60 years old, villagers generally also spoke fluent Mandarin. Hence, as an ethnic Han, the first author conducted his in-depth interviews in this language with a total of 20 people. He chose them on the basis of age and gender that reflected Longyue’s demographics. The village’s population was far too small to support any commercial eateries, so the first author conducted the interviews at the respondents’ homes, usually in the afternoon when the informants took their daily breaks from farmwork and household chores.
Analysis
How Villagers Used WeChat?
Prior to 2016, Longyue resembled the isolated village envisaged in Fei’s (1992) account of rural life. It used to suffer from slow and unreliable phone and Internet services, but villagers still had contact with nearby settlements despite the surrounding mountains. The telecommunications company China Telecom first introduced home broadband Internet to the village. The first month of service was free, but subscribers paid 164 RMB (23 USD) a month afterward. This fee accounted for a significant part of a household’s monthly budget, so most villagers unsubscribed after the first month. Internet connectivity improved dramatically in 2016 when the telecommunications company China Mobile built a 4G signal tower near Longyue. Charging only 69 RMB monthly for its broadband services, China Mobile quickly won the village’s favor. Besides broadband, many villagers also subscribe to cell phone plans. Unless they needed to upgrade their plans, villagers with home broadband typically subscribed only to the basic one that cost 30 RMB a month. With the village being such a tightly knit community, nobody seemed particularly concerned about securing access to their home WiFi. When the first author first arrived, he asked for his host’s password. She suggested that he could use anybody’s by simply downloading an app that broke such security measures. Ultimately, he did not download anything. Without much effort, he found out that residents set very simple passwords such as “00000000” or “12345678,” likely because they trusted each other.
Villagers used cell phones widely, and WeChat was often the very first app they downloaded. As can be seen in Table 1 below, Longyue’s most economically active residents (age 16–60) used the app. Villagers 15 years old and younger were still schooling. They lacked the economic means to purchase their own cell phones, and their parents also did not want phones to distract them from their studies. In contrast, almost everybody in the 16–60 age groups owned cell phones. Younger villagers (16–30 years old) previously used QQ, an earlier chatting app developed by Tencent. Nowadays, they were more likely to have downloaded games. Older villagers of 31–45 years old provided the labor for Longyue’s management and agricultural production, so they mainly saw WeChat as a tool to handle work and family affairs. Cadres set up chat groups to coordinate village works projects, while non-cadres used the app to socialize with relatives and friends, and access information and entertainment. Villagers also used WeChat to sell their cash crops to outside buyers. The village chief remarked that “economically, WeChat is really useful. We have one WeChat group for those villagers who grow regular bananas (xiangjiao 香蕉), and another one for those who grow more fibrous Japanese bananas (bajiao 芭蕉).”
| Table 1. WeChat users in Longyue. | |||||||
| Age (in years) | ≤15 | 16–20 | 21–30 | 31–40 | 41–50 | 51–60 | ≥61 |
| Total | 25 | 16 | 47 | 28 | 28 | 18 | 22 |
| Number of WeChat Users | 0 | 15 | 47 | 28 | 28 | 12 | 5 |
| Percentage | 0% | 93.8% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 66.7% | 21.7% |
| Number of Non-Users | 25 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 17 |
Even older villagers (46 years old and above) remained open to new ICTs despite their age; 66.7 percent of those in the 51–60 age group downloaded WeChat. They joined chatting groups centered on Yao folk songs, and they used the app’s voice messaging function to record and transmit the tunes they sung to other group members. For instance, the village head admitted: “I often use the Yao folk song groups to add friends living in nearby Yao villages. I know of many others who do the same.” Group members also told bawdy jokes, although this humor rarely became blatantly pornographic; nobody wanted state censors to shut the groups down. Groups memberships were not limited to just Yunnan or even China; the first author joined two groups where some members resided in the USA. Hence, Yao folk song groups function as “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1991) that link co-ethnic strangers together across vast geographical distances. Younger villagers considered these groups too old-fashioned for their tastes, so only older people would join them. As for the eldest villagers, most of them had feature phones to make phone calls and received text messages. Of the five elders who used WeChat, they mainly used its voice messaging and video conferencing functions to talk to relatives and friends of their age group.
More lightheartedly, villagers also used WeChat to “gamble red packets” (du hongbao 赌红包). An interested villager would set up a chatting group, with the game rule clearly stated in the group’s name. Nineteen-year-old just-married Sister Li, for instance, joined five such groups, of which one bore the name “Four packets of five yuan each, smallest gives” (wuyuan sibao xiaofa 五元四包小发). In other words, the leader of this group started the ball rolling by first issuing four digital red packets containing five RMB each. Group members then tapped on the packets to receive amounts randomly determined by the app. Those who reacted quickly would grab the highest payouts, while the person who received the least overall would issue four red packets of her own to start the next round.
In China, two other apps Alipay and QQ also enabled digital money transfers. In Shenzhen, these three apps occupied different media ecological niches in the lives of young migrant factory workers there. Simply put, they used WeChat most often in their daily lives to transmit their wages back home to WeChat-using recipients, to pay for their daily purchases, and to exchange digital red packs. In contrast, they reserved Alipay for larger, impersonal transfers at department stores and online retailers. As for QQ, if workers used its digital wallet at all, they did it only to purchase in-game virtual goods (McDonald, 2019). In comparison, Longyue villagers used WeChat exclusively. WeChat already served their online needs, so unless they previously gone outside to work or study, they saw no point in installing other functionally similar apps.
The Ethicality of Gendered Strangers
More controversially, the arrival of WeChat has heightened the villagers’ awareness of the ethically ambiguous figure of the stranger. Theoretically, strangers may be stranger-kings who, if properly propitiated and tamed, can provide vitality, sovereignty, and fertility (Sahlins, 2008). More often, the stranger’s radical alterity echoes the numinous presence of the divine itself (Pitt-Rivers, 1968). In China, Mandarin words that mean “stranger” range from shengren (生人, literally “raw person,” contrasting with shuren 熟人 “cooked person”) to wairen (外人 “outsider”) and the more common moshengren (陌生人 “unfamiliar person”). Since they lacked status in the local social hierarchy, strangers historically did not warrant courteous treatment (Erbaugh, 2008).
The Yao language also features numerous words for “stranger.” The Yao people use puq txg to politely address female strangers older than oneself. This term assumes that the woman is married, and it implies an inquiry about her name. The terms of address for older male, younger female, and younger male strangers are piuq kxj, piuq Eaam, and piuq yrud, respectively. In contrast, Kc’q refers to stranger-guests (Lombard & Purnell, 1968). Like the Han Chinese, the Yao of Longyue also treat strangers with caution. To Sister Jiang, strangers were people unfamiliar to her. “These people are dangerous,” she added, “I tend to believe what other people say, so I feel I’ll get cheated.” Similarly, Sister Chen defined a stranger as someone from “outside the village. Anyone I don’t know is a stranger. He’s not to be trusted.” She explained further:
I divide the strangers I get to know from WeChat into two groups: those who live in nearby villages, and those who live further away, such as in Kunming (Yunnan’s provincial seat) and Jinghong. The first type, I can usually see what he actually looks like from his profile photo and the postings in his WeChat Moments. I seldom leave voice messages, so I usually text him. If the conversation goes well, we sometimes meet in person to have lunch or something. After getting to know him better, he’s not a stranger anymore. The second type, the ones who live further away, they’ll always be strangers no matter how long we’ve been talking on WeChat.
Sister Chen’s typology of strangers demonstrates how hostile strangers can be transformed into welcomed guests. Reflecting Fei’s (1992) ideal rural relationality, the first enjoys the geographical and cultural proximity of familiarity. In contrast, the second type lives too far away, such that his geographical location conflates with his cultural distance, and invalidates any possibilities of familiarization.
With increased contact with stranger-outsiders, one now had more chances of extramarital affairs with them. We report on three cases here, all of which feature women as the alleged perpetrators. Despite this gender bias, men are of course equally susceptible to these affairs (McDonald, 2019). Rather, this lop-sidedness exists likely because our chief informant Sister Chen is herself a woman, and therefore privier to other women’s secrets. Had we a man as a chief informant, the data would most likely have been male-centered instead. Our other informants also recounted the same stories as Sister Chen did, but with fewer details. Hence, we mainly use Chen told us. Before we discuss the cases in detail, however, we stress that Longyue already witnessed similar scandals even before the advent of WeChat. One villager related:
These affairs started in 2011, when they opened that new iron mine at New Village. The mining company compensated each household with two, three million RMB. That was when some of our women started to actively seek out (gouda 勾搭) the men there. These men made perfect targets: they were rich and they were Yao, so communication wasn’t an issue.
Furthermore, 20 km of roads of varying qualities of construction separated Longyue from New Village, so this distance helped to obfuscate the affairs from discovery. Crucially, the first author did not hear about the extramarital affairs directly from the alleged perpetrators or their husbands. Given their scandalous nature, neither of these parties would openly discuss them. Rather, the first author heard from other villagers, including the host during his stay, Sister Chen. The two got along very well. Coupled with the fact that the first author was an outsider who would not stay long enough to retell the gossip, Sister Chen trusted him with the details.
The first author observed during fieldwork that men handled all the heavy agricultural work in Longyue. In July 2018, he paid Sister Li and ate all his meals at her house. At that time, Li and her husband Brother Bo were erecting a new house in their compound, and they had just finished the foundations. Only Bo actually worked on the house; Li sometimes played with her phone and sometimes left the house to socialize with other women. Having more free time, the first author reasoned, Li and other women enjoyed more opportunities to look for lovers. If men also had affairs despite their work, their infidelity had yet to become public knowledge.
Three Cases of Adultery
The first case involved Sister Bai. She married her village cadre husband in Longyue from another Yao village nearby, and she chaired the committee in another village that administered Longyue. WeChat users could yaoyiyao (摇一摇) and shake their phones to randomly connect with users nearby, and Bai used this function often to add outsider men as friends. During the chats, she would ascertain the man’s suitability for trysts, but would immediately delete him if he lived in the nearby town; she could not risk him being someone they knew, or having common acquaintances. If the man passed muster, Bai would meet him at the county seat at Jinghong. As Sister Chen revealed:
Because she’s a cadre, [Bai] can claim committee meetings to justify her trips out. She will also ask Sister Li and me to go along, and say it’s a “classmates’ gathering” to our respective husbands. This way, we can legitimately stay out overnight. We’ll eat and drink, and then they’ll go get hotel rooms (kaifang 开房) with the men. I don’t join them.
Sister Bai had a long-term lover at Jinghong. This man was wealthy enough to give her a gold necklace and a gold watch as presents. To evade detection, they hardly contact each other on the phone. Rather, when Bai could go out, she would openly declare in her WeChat Moments that she would “go back to [her] natal home” or “go out to do things with friends.” These updates signaled her availability to her lover, and he would contact her later at a hotel they previously agreed upon. “Her husband definitely suspected something fishy was going on,” Sister Chen said, “but he had no proof, so he could only pretend nothing happened.”
The second case centered on Sister Deng. Originally a Landian Yao from Laos, she married into Longyue in 1997 as part of a larger trend of cross-border marriages (Grillot, 2015). In the years since, she came to speak Mandarin fluently, but her literacy skills remained limited. She became an avid WeChat user in 2015. She read the essays posted in public accounts, and communicated with family and friends with voice messages, and she also enjoyed using WeChat Moments to interact with her friends and to post updates of her own. Before WeChat, she seldom contacted her natal family. Her home landline could not call overseas; only the Laotian side could, but the call was prohibitively expensive at ten RMB every two minutes. Furthermore, with her parents having passed away and her siblings all married, Deng had fewer reasons to call home. With WeChat, she added her niece in Laos. The two became so intimate that the niece even visited her in January 2019.
According to Sister Chen, Deng did more with WeChat:
She talked to men online – some as far away as Kunming – and even met them in person. She stayed out overnight too often, so her husband gave her the knuckle treatment. One time, she lost two teeth. Another time, she spotted a blue-black forehead. The husband wasn’t a violent man. If only she’d behaved herself (an’an fenfen 安安分分), and stayed home …
The husband never actually caught Deng in the act; the fear of being cuckolded motivated his violence. Despite the abuse, however, she did not divorce him. She had no family in Laos to go back to. Now that she was in her thirties, she was also too old and undesirable a bride in rural Yunnan if she were to divorce and remarry. Later, the first author attempted to query Deng about her use of WeChat, but she resisted: “I don’t use the phone these days … I won’t add strangers on WeChat. Even if someone sends me an invitation, I’ll refuse it.”
In our last case, Sister Bai’s friend Sister Li brought her lover home, and her husband Brother Bo caught them red-handed. According to many villagers, although Li had two sons with Bo, she was already cuckolding him even before WeChat’s advent. He knew about her infidelities, but he turned a blind eye. This feigned ignorance emboldened Li further after she started using WeChat in 2015. Bo could tolerate her no longer, so one day in late 2018, he claimed that he would stay overnight at the county seat. Li contacted her lover whom she got to know after he helped her build her new house. She invited him to stay at her place that night. As Sister Chen recounted:
Night fell, and Bo went back home with several of his friends. He knocked furiously on his front door, but nobody answered. Bo’s helpers surrounded the house, and Li finally opened the door under pressure. Lo! Her lover was inside! The gathered villagers demanded that the lover pay Bo a penalty, and settled on 70,000 RMB after some haggling. But Bo was too upset, and he only wanted to divorce Li. He wouldn’t accept the monetary settlement, and the lover left scot-free. In the subsequent court case, Bo and Li were awarded custody of one son each. Li must leave, but not without half of Bo’s land and 20,000 RMB in alimony. Li shamed the village with her indiscretion, so Bo had to spend another 40,000 RMB to hire a priest to “wash the village” (xi cunzi 洗村子), and host a feast for everyone.
Li settled in the county seat after her separation, but remained close to both her sons because they went to school there. Even the son in Bo’s custody opted to stay in town during the weekends. If he did return to Longyue, he would stay with his maternal grandmother. While the divorce took its toll on both Bo and Li, the former definitely took a bigger hit.
To understand how these cases of adultery inform our understanding of WeChat’s social impact, we examine briefly the literature about women in rural China. The low economic returns for agricultural work drive migration to the cities for better-paying jobs. Men leave more often, so women made up only 34.8% (or 100.2 million) of the 288 million migrant workers in 2018 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2019). Labor migrations (Zhang, 2013) and e-commerce (Yu & Cui, 2019) can improve rural women’s economic power, but it remains debatable whether these women accrue more cultural and political capital as well. Traditional gender and kinship norms and hierarchies remain recalcitrant to change (Ge et al., 2011), but women left behind to do agricultural work become household heads with more decision-making powers (Matthews & Nee, 2000). Rural women also migrate back home, because of discrimination in the cities (Gaetano, 2015), or family and marriage needs (Murphy, 2002). Given the limited opportunities to escape the drudgery of farming and family duties at home (Murphy, 2002), some women re-migrate after marriage (Lou et al., 2004). Generally speaking, the prevailing conservative patriarchy enables men to dominate women in their households (Fan, 2003).
We can see this dominance over women’s sexuality in how Longyue villagers regard the introduction of WeChat. Reflecting the ethical ambiguity surrounding the cell phone elsewhere in the world (Archambault, 2017; Lipset, 2013), Sister Chen’s husband remarked on WeChat’s socially corrosive consequences:
Last time, villagers had few chances of meeting outsiders. With WeChat, they can now yaoyiyao (摇一摇) to find new friends from nearby to chat online. Those who hit it on will meet offline for meals and drinks, and whatever that happens after the drinking. Both men and women in the village would look for outside flings. If a woman often stayed out, her husband would suspect but wouldn’t say anything. But if he had concrete evidence, he would likely choose divorce.
A check with the village records confirmed that from 2011 to 2018, only five couples divorced (two in 2014 and three in 2018). This number was undoubtedly small, but in a village where its 184 residents usually marry for life, any legal separation would make a lasting impression. To avoid the hurtful gossip that inevitably followed divorces (and perhaps give their rocky unions a chance to recover), unhappy couples usually opted to live apart while remaining legally married. The village records would not have captured this sort of separations.
Well aware that their spouses might have lovers on the side, many villagers admitted to checking their partners’ cell phones. Sister Chen said:
Some couples will check each other’s phone. To prevent that, they lock up their phones with passwords. We have this couple in the village who quarrel all the time because of it. My husband and I, we don’t lock our phones, but we will tell each other what the password is if we do. But we normally don’t check anyway, primarily because we trust each other.
Sister Jiang also remarked, “Of course I checked regularly. Especially in the past, I checked my husband’s phone all the time. He did the same too. But I don’t do it now. I never found anything anyway, so I gradually trusted him.” Naturally, people who do have extramarital affairs also strive to keep their affairs secret. Regarding cell phone secrecy, anthropologists researching elsewhere report such means of evading detection as regularly deleting incriminating conversation records, an implicit agreement that neither party will check the other’s phone on the tacit understanding that checking will always reveal dirt (Archambault, 2017), and having one phone for normal social interactions and another one for trysts (McDonald, 2019). In Longyue, villagers also have fairly sophisticated ways to avoid exposure. Sister Bai above, for instance, forwent the phone entirely, relying instead on secret codes to signal her availability to her lover.
People have always had extramarital affairs, so it is erroneous to claim that dalliances happened only after WeChat’s introduction. However, the villagers recognized that the app definitely heightened the possibilities of marital infidelity, which explained why our informants expressed ambiguity when the first author asked them to evaluate WeChat. Sister Jiang remarked:
[WeChat] made everyday communication easier, but husbands and wives have fights more often because of it. Sometimes, my husband checks my phone and sees that I’ve been talking to strangers, and we’ll quarrel about it. Actually, it’s really nothing; it’s just normal chatting in the WeChat groups. I seldom do it anyway.
Overall, however, the app has greatly widened everybody’s social circle and also made it easier to negotiate prices for Longyue’s agricultural produce with outside buyers. The extramarital affairs, though scandalous, have not been numerous enough to seriously threaten the village’s social cohesion, so the residents tolerate the use of WeChat.
Conclusion
The advent of WeChat in 2011 and the integration of the digital wallet function two years later have catapulted China to the forefront of developing technologies for mobile payments. Users can now pay their credit card, utilities, and phone bills; hail taxis; order food; book hotels, movie tickets, and train and plane tickets online; and even give money to panhandlers (Lim, 2017)! However, WeChat hardly enjoys even expansion within China; users remain concentrated in the densely populated and economically developed coastal regions in the east.
Provinces further inland caught on to the app later. Villagers in our field site Longyue, a mostly Yao settlement located in the remote mountains of Xishuangbanna that border Thailand and Laos, started using WeChat only in 2016 after a 4G signal tower was constructed there. Before 2016, the villagers contacted the outside world only via an ill-repaired cement road traversed mainly by trucks that shipped out their agricultural products. Presently, however, almost everybody uses the app to coordinate work and family affairs, participate in folk song groups, gamble on a small-scale basis to enliven the drudgery of rural life, maintain contact with their kin across the border, or simply to chat with one another in their free time.
Increased contact with the outside world also heightened the villagers’ wariness toward strangers. Previous research reveals that Chinese encounters with strangers have become routine (Sun, 2019), entertaining (Tan & Xu, 2020), and aggravating (Fang & Repnikova, 2018). Answering McDonald’s (2019) call for an anthropology of strangership, we argue that while some strangers purchase the village’s agricultural produce to benefit Longyue economically, others corrode the village’s social fabric. As a basic infrastructure upon which WeChat operates, the smart phone also affords greater online anonymity and opportunities to contact outsiders for extramarital affairs. With or without WeChat and cell phones, people have always been having these affairs. Yet, technological changes in Longyue now mean that some villagers will check their spouses’ phones for evidence of infidelity, while others try to stop unfaithful spouses with verbal and physical violence. Actual divorces, while not impossible, remain rare because of the hurtful gossip they inevitably attract. On a national level, the central government seeks to economically develop the inland provinces further, so Longyue will only have even more encounters with strangers in the future. Whether or not that prolonged contact brings fortune remains to be seen.