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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Xiaowei Wang
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June 13 - June 26, 2022
After the Great Leap Forward, a food coupon system was used throughout the country, controlling how much food each family could purchase—rice, grains, eggs, and meat. The system was a mechanism by the government to control urban consumption, agricultural prices, and yields. The food coupons would be used all the way into the 1990s.
TVEs were a decisively indigenous innovation, centered around local, village-level decision-making—an agile environment of sorts. By 1995, “TVEs accounted for approximately a quarter of China’s GDP, two-thirds of the total rural output
the same set of market forces that created the problem is now purportedly coming to the rescue.
Shanzhai pushes the boundaries of what we currently think of as innovation and argues for the right not only to use a device or software but also to collaboratively alter, change, and reclaim it—a shanzhai economy instead of an innovation economy.
In 2019, Alipay had seven hundred million users, with nearly two hundred million transactions a day. It also has a credit-scoring system, Sesame Credit, for Alipay loans, which is often confused with a national-credit scoring system.
A farmer’s assets might be pigs or chickens. As a result, Ant Financial is setting up cameras on farms that can display a farmer’s assets in real time to help assess credit scores and risk in lending scenarios. Such data can also be used by ET Agricultural Brain to help farmers with the animal-raising process. With this risk-assessment camera in place, farmers can then use Alipay to apply for loans. Already, a chicken farmer in Lankao County, Henan, has used this complex Bio-Inventory of Assets System to apply for RMB 200,000 in loans on Alipay.
One of my favorite newsletters, The Strategist (a weekly dispatch of shopping deals from New York magazine), recommends that I buy the very hyped Orolay down coat, a “viral” coat exclusively available on Amazon.com with more than seven thousand reviews. Priced at US$130, and with a four-star rating, it seems like a good deal. Man Repeller, a well-known fashion blog, agrees, saying the coat has “murky origins” but that it recommends the 90 percent down jacket. The murky origin, it turns out, is rural China. Jiaxing county, Zhejiang to be precise, where locals work for Orolay, churning out these
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On the internet, Peppa Pig is a rallying cry for disenfranchised youth. She is a meme, an online symbol for a growing group of people who believe the dominant system of society not only has no place for them, but also that, deep down, the system is rigged. Behind the memes of Peppa is not only a defeated irony but an anarchic embrace of “antisocial” behavior.
