Zhou An'an, From Utopia to Leviathan

Zhou An’an, “The Supreme Court finally overturned the idea that ‘996 is a blessing,’ but did not address the larger problems of the platform economy”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
China’s crackdown on high-tech multi-millionaires, movie stars, and other members of the “glitterati” class has been much in the news over the past few months, variously interpreted as yet another power grab by Xi Jinping, and/or as a populist political gesture, addressing genuine and widespread problems of inequality in Chinese society.  Establishment intellectuals have had a fair bit to say about this and related topics.
 
One example is an essay by Zhu Yongjia (b. 1931) entitled “The Bloody Human Relationships Behind the 2021 Hurun Rich List,” published on July 12, 2021.  Students of the Cultural Revolution will remember Zhu, who, as a radical faculty member at Fudan University in Shanghai helped Yao Wenyuan write his critique of the playwright Wu Han’s “Hui Rui Dismissed from Office,” one of the texts that launched Mao’s assault on the Party and the government.  Zhu subsequently served in the Shanghai Municipal Government—or the organs that replaced it—in various capacities during the Cultural Revolution, and eventually spent several years in prison after the fall of the Gang of Four for having committed counter-revolutionary crimes .  He was paroled in 1988 for medical reasons.  Zhu is mentioned repeatedly in Elizabeth Perry’s Proletarian Power:  Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Routledge, 1968).
 
Zhu’s recently published text suggests that his ideas may not have changed all that much, but then one does not have to be a Red Guard to condemn the excesses of capitalism while perusing the Hurun Global Rich List, which ranks the billionaires of the world according to their wealth.  The final paragraph of Zhu’s essay sums up his views:
 
“Furthermore, the eight-hour workday is the result of workers' struggle, and it is also clearly stipulated in our labor law. Jack Ma has said, ‘I personally think 996 is a great blessing, and that there are many companies and people who would like to adopt this system but cannot.’  Is this not a lie? Where did Jack Ma's wealth come from? There are only two sources, one is brutal exploitation of workers' overtime labor, and the other is loan sharking, relying on his monopoly to obtain high profits. On the whole, it reflects the cruel exploitation of labor by capital. Therefore, capital's minimum wage for labor must take into account the needs of workers to raise their children and to take care of themselves when they are old or infirm. Our policy should be lean to the side of the workers, because after all, it is labor that creates the world. We are a socialist country led by the Communist Party, and we cannot forget our responsibilities.”
 
Another example is the essay by Wang Hui (b. 1959), the famous New Left scholar, entitled “What Kind of ‘Equality’ Do We Ultimately Want?  Behind the Debate over Common Prosperity.” Originally published in 2011, the text was republished in the Beijing Cultural Review on August 24, 2021, in a context explained in the editors’ introduction:
 
“In the summer of 2021, with the announcement of the Central Government's support of Zhejiang’s decision to build a ‘Demonstration Zone for Common Prosperity,’ a social discussion on ‘how to define common prosperity’ also quietly emerged. On August 17, the tenth meeting of the Central Finance and Economics Commission studied the issue of ‘solidly promoting common prosperity’ and articulated the concept of ‘common prosperity’ and related policy guidelines for the first time, emphasizing that common prosperity is an essential requirement of socialism and an important feature of Chinese-style modernization, and that it is necessary to adhere to people-centered development and promote common prosperity through high-quality development. After nearly four decades of ‘making some people rich first,’ the issue of ‘common prosperity’ has finally entered the core of China's policy agenda, now that absolute poverty has been eradicated.”
 
Wang’s essay, in two parts, is too long and complex to be summarized here, but his stances on equality and the meaning of socialism are well known.
 
The text translated here is yet another commentary on inequality and the future of the Chinese economy from the perspective of the algorithm-driven platform economies made possible by advances in information technology.  The author, Zhou An’an, has worked as an editor of the Beijing Cultural Review and is now pursuing her doctorate at the Graduate Institute of New Media Studies at Peking University.  She has published, fairly sparingly at least according to my browser, on a variety of topics over the years, which suggests that he may alternate between free-lance journalism and editorial responsibilities.    
 
Zhou’s argument is interesting without being overly complex or polemical.  She begins with the sad example of the United States, where changes in information technology, and particularly the rise of the Internet, contributed mightily to offshoring and subcontracting, which ultimately hollowed out manufacturing and manufacturing jobs at home.  Workers had originally been promised that these changes would free the from the drudgery of assembly-line jobs, but many were ultimately were freed of their jobs as well as the drudgery.  The more recent rise the platform economy—meaning Uber and other similar algorithm- and app-driven companies—came with a similar promise to turn everyone into “independent entrepreneurs," but ultimately created a gig-economy of precarious jobs and continuous uncertainty.
 
Zhou next turns his attention to China’s platform economy, which is huge, encompassing delivery services of all sorts, ride-hailing companies, logistics services of many types…(see here for a translation of a piece on China’s food delivery companies, which explores the effects of the algorithms on the drivers).  Zhou notes that, since China’s platform economy arose together with China’s investments in manufacturing capacity and infrastructure, they have not yet fueled the same kind of hollowing-out as seen in the United States and other Western economies. 

At the same time, however, the platform economies are in competition with certain traditional industries—such as taxis—and are also using customer data to try to open up other commercial possibilities, such as easy loans or credit made available via an app from your friendly food delivery service or its friendly partner bank…The point of these platform economies is scale and data, and they tend toward monopoly and take on lives of their own, which can readily have unforeseen side effects and counter effects that run counter to public interests.  Facebook, anyone?  So Zhou’s argument is not a triumphalist “America got it wrong while China is getting it right,” but rather a sober reminder that China should keep its eye on the ball as platform economies flex their muscles. 
 
Translation
 
Platform Labor:  From “Utopia” to “Leviathan”
  
From the perspective of its technological and social history, the Internet, a technology that impacts social organization through the transmission of information, has developed at the juncture between freedom and control.  Since the birth of the World Wide Web, information technology industry has given birth to countless "jobs of the future," accompanying wave after wave of technological optimism that promised a prosperous economy and greater self-development and freedom to workers.

However, in the United States, the birthplace of this technology, we are witnessing the greatest wave of employment precarity and unemployment since World War II. In China, as the mobile Internet infrastructure extends to cover the country’s life as a whole, the number of new jobs that rely on the Internet to organize labor continues to expand at a rapid pace, and new labor disputes are increasingly surfacing:

First, base-level workers employed by Internet platforms often do not have the formal status of workers, which means that the labor relationship between the platform and the workers is not strictly legal, and the workers cannot enjoy the legal protections accorded to those with the status of workers.

Second, the platform data feedback system powered by the algorithm has greatly refined the degree and process of labor control, so that front-line workers are more oppressed than ever before.

This paper will focus on two aspects of platform labor. 
 
First, it briefly recounts the historical process through which the model of labor organization known today as "platform capitalism" has been repeatedly redesigned at different historical moments by those who have shaped information technology—always dealing with the basic contradiction between "freedom and control" in Western social thought—and how platform capitalism ultimately detached itself from Western post-industrial society.
 
Second, we analyze the similarities and differences between China's current platform economy development model and platform capitalism, and point out the future possibilities embedded in Chinese practice.

Liberal Elites and Precarious Labor: A Brief History of Platform Labor
  
In the early stages of the creation of the Internet labor platform, capital and mass media created a blueprint of labor utopia, almost the direct opposite of mass media’s current criticism of the "algorithmic manipulation" in which the platforms engage.  The idea was that labor and the platforms would transcend the traditional labor relationship because both parties would be part of a more free and equal collaborative relationship.  The point of the algorithm was to plan the labor process more efficiently, which would not only mean that workers could do more and earn more, but they could also choose to close the app at any time in function of their personal needs.  

This blueprint was not just a scam, and many factory workers chose to enter the platform-driven gig economy, one of the reasons being that for the same unskilled work, the Internet platform could not only provide more lucrative remuneration, but the daily work experience was also more pleasant and freer than the manufacturing assembly line, with its strict physical controls and its tedium. There are several older versions of this idea that "networked mobile employment will be freer than the industrial system," but it is the counter-cultural movements of the 1950s and 1960s that are most directly related to today's information technology labor system.
 
From the end of World War II through the height of the Cold War, the needs of the military, fueled by nuclear threats, fear of total warfare, and the invention of large-scale automated weapons gave birth to a huge military-industrial complex in the United States. This process created a technological system and a concept of research and development that was increasingly digitized, and which dispensed with people’s political and cultural interventions.

The way such technology was designed led to the perception, which lasted long after the end World War II, that computers were an anti-human technology, part of a corrupt bureaucracy, a cold, unthinking system, and damaged if rational individuals. The critique of industrial society since the 1960s, from Wright Mills to Galbraith to Marcuse, has been based on this technological imaginary: information technology provides the technical means to centralize power.
 
From this critique, a counter-cultural movement version of the possibilities of information technology was born. Silicon Valley hippies, inspired by Orientalist spiritual experiences like LSD and yoga, wanted to redesign personalized computing systems as a technological means of "transforming the individual experience.” They dreamed of replacing large mainframe computers with smaller, personal devices that would change the way individuals perceive the world, break down bureaucratic centralization, and promote "the equal association of free people.”

The values sought in this technological redesign also resonated deeply with the founding myth of the American historical narrative, i.e., that a group of talented people had created an ideal world in a new land.  In the post-Cold War era, however, as the political energy of the counterculture movement slowly faded away, the rebellious children of the middle class returned to the big corporations, redirecting their techno-social imagination toward a new reincarnation as a commercial force: the frontiers of the ideal world would be in cyberspace, and reaching these frontiers required information technology, not navigation of the seas.  The "new man" called for by this model of information technology emerged out of the self-imagination of the young intellectual elite of Silicon Valley.

In Kevin Kelly’s futurological handbook Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, a huge hit in the 1990s, the new era of networked work was described as " decentralized, collaborative and adaptive." The author talked little about the manufacturing jobs that were at the center of the industrial age, but instead devoted his attention to knowledge workers, arguing that entrepreneurial engineers, scientists, and other liberal elites would create a more egalitarian and collaborative model of work, realizing a neo-communitarian garden of Eden, a true institutional rebellion against the technological authorities that had once dominated America. 
 
It was also in the 1990s that the Clinton administration and the elite of the information industry began to link the future development of the United States to computers, telecommunications, and especially the Internet. As never before, the American public believed that Internet technology would break down market regulations and corrupt political practices and once again turn the market into an engine for political and social change. Mobile communications and the Internet offered the prospect of business organizations that would transcend hierarchy: a new order where everyone makes their own decisions and everyone derives pleasure from their work. In the minds of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, whose design models dominated the development of the Internet, it was possible to use information technology to create a social system that combined the competing demands of business, worker self-actualization, and democratic participation.

This world of interconnected computer systems was no longer to be led by Cold War military personnel and high government officials using mainframes to look for enemy bombers, but rather a new generation of intellectual elites composed of Silicon Valley investors and computer technicians. The world-changing heroes were no longer Che Guevara-style revolutionary youths, but rather knowledge workers who spent their days with laptops, modems, and inspiring ideas. They are solitary workers who are naturally adapted to a centerless system, relying on their intelligence and self-management skills to navigate a horizontal work organization; the most successful of them will create one Silicon Valley innovation myth after another, with the help of the same flexible global capital they themselves possess.

This vision of the ideal work model was completely different from the manufacturing employment system shaped by the previous generation in the post-war era, in which the state made appropriate policy decisions and individuals had full-time jobs in an industry, with fixed stable hours, wage raises through seniority, along with pension, health care, and workplace injury protections. This was the traditional American view of work and the enviable lifestyle of the American middle class in the postwar period, and it has largely shaped the Western world's imagination, and indeed that of the world as a whole, of what the ideal citizen’s life should be. This work model was closely tied to the Fordist manufacturing system, and reached its peak in the 1970s.
 
In fact, this management model, which views employees as company assets and provides them with a stable path to growth, probably never spread outside of the manufacturing sector. After manufacturing peaked in the United States, the growth of telecommunications and mainframe computers led to globalized outsourcing collaborations based on piecework. While manufacturing was subcontracted to the global South, large companies headquartered in developed Western countries could likewise move administrative work that relied on information processing, such as auditing, filing, customer service, and personnel management, to former colonies that were now developing countries, thereby circumventing the bargaining and oversight of unions and labor regulations.

Flexible hiring and firing is easier in regions where human resources are abundant and cheap, such as India. These adjustments will be reflected in the capital value of the company, and shareholders will see this change in strategy as an effective optimization of spending on "non-core businesses" that can improve the multinational's "return on investment" and "core competencies.”

At the same time, what was happening in America was the gradual hollowing out of the middle class due to de-industrialization and outsourcing. With the end of the countercultural movement, the intellectual elites and ordinary people flooding the labor market entered the service sector in large numbers, working in familiar fast-food restaurants and retail chains (such as McDonald's and Wal-Mart), the service sector model that came to cover the world following a new round of globalization in the 1990s. This historic transformation in the model of labor organization happened at the same time as the new Silicon Valley elites triumphed the role of free individuals in the new IT order.

Unlike manufacturing jobs, service industry jobs have been strongly characterized by temporary employment from the outset. Long before the birth of the World Wide Web, the global communication network consisting of telecommunications and telephones had already formed a vast system of global outsourcing of service industry labor contracts. The advent of the Internet has certainly deepened this logic of global outsourcing, greatly enhancing the ability of globalized companies to allocate resources among different regions.

Out of Control was one of the key intellectual resources helping multinational executives in the 1990s to understand the new economy and new technologies.  This process was undoubtedly facilitated by the organizational imagination of the Internet technology elite, whose origins can be traced to the counterculture movement but which eventually aligned with neoliberalism. With the conscious or unconscious complicity of both parties, the "platform-Internet-enterprise" model became the most visible model of the new economy. In this mythical world of riches, free workers on online platforms are the investors and technological elites work to perfect automation processes, the sharing economy and the Internet of Things. For a time, it was believed that the average person who moves from manufacturing to services would maintain the standard of living and wealth expectations inherited from the 1970s.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which left a large number of service industry workers homeless due to debt, people identified the culprit as problems in financial technology, and did not reexamine basic industrial and labor patterns. Instead of undergoing structural changes after 2008, the external environment that created the IT model of labor organization was indeed further strengthened. Concerned about public debt, governments continued address economic problems through monetary policy. Both the increase in global corporate savings and the system of tax havens freed up large amounts of surplus capital, and the most favored sector for this capital has continued to be asset-light technology companies.

As the number of those who are truly without property in the West increases, they have no choice  but to seek out one of the countless temporary jobs offered by emerging platform technology companies. The trio of  "techno-elite + global capital + precarious labor" thus forms a closed-loop system in which the global lower-middle class bears the consequences of informal work on Internet platforms, allowing us to see the full picture of the precarious social system in today's American society, created by the new information technology.

Having transformed labor patterns, Internet platform technologies have begun to reverberate in other areas of social life as well. British director Ken Loach's film "Sorry We Missed You" keenly captures this trend, depicting the gradual disintegration of an old-fashioned working-class family struggling to cope with daily crises in an informal work environment.

In the wake of these social crises, Silicon Valley technology companies became “evil dragons” and not “dragon slayers” in the eyes of public opinion, and English-language critical scholarship began to shift its academic focus to the inequalities created by global outsourcing and Internet platform labor. The image of the Internet as a technological object in popular culture no longer celebrates the expanding frontiers of human freedom but rather curses the alienation imposed by Leviathan, and history has come full circle. 
 
China: Internet Platforms Embedded in Infrastructure Development 
 
In the globalization of information technology, which formally began in the second half of the 1990s, former colonial countries such as India received a greater share of services such as business process outsourcing, while manufacturing went to China. In 1991 Manmohan Singh (b. 1932), who later became India's prime minister, set up a national software outsourcing industrial park in Bangalore.  The following year, China's electronics manufacturing industry began to take off in Shenzhen, with large numbers of young workers from rural areas entering global factories, supporting “Made in China” with their low social welfare and precarious employment status.

After more than two decades of development, the discourse of the fourth industrial revolution is forging ahead, and the application of technology remains at the core of this new social vision. But it is clear that the global industrial division of labor in the last IT revolution has greatly influenced the preferences of different countries and regions as to the future course of technology and development.
 
Both upstream and downstream countries in the service chain are beginning to seek a return to manufacturing, while hoping to continue the information industry's dominance of flexible employment systems through some mitigating policy tools.  Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes noted in an interview:  "We talk a lot about Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, Postmate drivers, the gig economy, and in terms of development, these are all the right trends, but for workers in these alternative work arrangements, their income is 'very precarious.'"

Tech companies are beginning to join political forces interested in promoting Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs, a welfare program that would pay $500 a month in cash to the poor who earn less than $50,000 a year by increasing taxes on the wealthy. Countries downstream in the information services chain, such as India, are beginning to see a strong wave of national conservatism and radical opposition to China's emerging online industries; in the run-up to the 2020 U.S. elections, India followed the Trump administration's ban on Douyin and WeChat, taking a more aggressive stance than the U.S. government.

Although differences in Internet platform industries and statistical methods make it difficult to calculate the exact number of people engaged in this industry in different countries, it is surely an undisputed fact that China has the largest number of people working in the platform economy. Like the new elite in Silicon Valley, Chinese Internet platform companies have had a strong self image as a technical elite from the outset, and have long fully embraced the globalization ideology of the new millennium, seeing demand-driven flexible employment as the right way to build an ideal social organization form in a business sense.

In concrete practice, however, unlike the United States, the development of China's Internet service industry has not been accompanied by an exodus of manufacturing, but is deeply embedded in China's economic development process centered on manufacturing and infrastructure development. The development of China's manufacturing sector has given rise to the largest rapid urbanization in human history, and the service sector in the emerging metropolis has always been in short supply, so that platform companies like Taobao have played an important role in this process as a commercial network for manufactured light industrial goods. Around 2015, a large number of Internet platform service industries based on algorithmic technologies emerged, and have been in a state of rapid market expansion ever since. In this process, Internet platform firms gradually began to replace established service industry networks in China's cities, triggering a series of social conflicts at different levels.

First and foremost is the contradiction between the strong technological rules of the Internet and the looser rules of grassroots society. Taking the case of ride-hailing platforms, for example, several Uber-like platforms relying on venture capital have completed the market occupation of China's major cities in a very short period of time, becoming a fixture in how Chinese people get around on an everyday basis. Their flexible employment model is also considered by local governments to be a powerful tool to solve the problem of under-employment, and governments are therefore motivated to cooperate with ride-hailing platforms at the policy level. Although the platforms have been forced to make changes in several mega-cities after having upset the vested interests of taxi companies and drivers, they still receive considerable support at the local government level. In this process, the service rules set by the rapidly expanding Internet platform companies soon come into conflict with life logic at the grassroots level.
 
One example are the violent conflicts that have erupted around the Hitch car-pooling service 顺风.[2]  Because of complicated social factors and a lack of supervision of driver qualifications, there have been a number of vicious criminal incidents in the context of long-distance ride-hailing services in second- and third-tier cities. To a large extent, these incidents stem from the transformation of life logic of different regions via the rapidly expanding Internet platform service industry.  The platform companies try to use the travel technology platform as a medium to impose the relatively safety of travel in big cities to grassroots societies that do not conform to this logic at all, ignoring the fact that the platform service industry is based on the basic management capabilities of any given place.

Although the ride-hailing platform quickly suspended and then overhauled this particular ride-hailing service following public criticism, the underlying logic of the network platform's continued market expansion has not changed: the platform technology establishes a series of hard rules and tries to forcefully change the way local society operates with its business model. When there is a clash between the two, external social costs are once again borne by traditional social organizations and individual workers, as in a case from early 2021, when the sudden death from overwork of an employee working in Pinduoduo’s online vegetable selling platform in turn triggered a discussion about how online fresh food sales platform are depriving individual vendors of their living space.
 
One of the reasons why there has not yet been a large-scale violent conflict between China's online platform system and Chinese grassroots society may be that rapid urbanization has created a large demand for services, which means that the nascent Internet platform service system has not completely replaced the original social system.  Another factor is that equal access to the Internet created by strong infrastructure-building capacity has prompted many of those working in the informal economy to seek to enter the Internet platform system. In light of these factors, the contradiction between the strong technical rules of the Internet and the logic of grassroots society remains at a stage where it can be absorbed and transformed.
 
When the scale effect of the Internet platform economy expands to the point that it can no longer grow within the original ecosystem, and companies subsequently seek to transform other ecosystems, conflicts and contradictions will erupt in more intense forms. The flow of information on the Internet platform system generates data, and a series of controversies have occurred around the public nature of the data. When these data serve commercial transactions between customers in the traditional sense, it can be processed within the logic of private business; but when, because of scale effects, the data begin to bear on social logics outside of commercial transactions (such as credit systems), ownership becomes a problem.

The widespread backlash triggered by some Internet companies' consumer loan inducements is that they invade the logic of social life outside of commercial transactions [i.e., a food delivery platform sells customer data to a bank, or itself offers loans via the internet to consumers, as in this example].  These kinds of consumer loans seek to alter Chinese families’ traditional notion of saving, and may use the credit system as an means to challenge the operation of Chinese social ethics, replacing them with business principles. In Western countries, where information systems have completely transformed the logic of the organization of work and society, it is precisely due to the fact the rules of capital have come to dominate social life that the Internet giants of these countries have shed their liberal tinge of progressivism and once again appear as a Leviathan-like presence in the eyes of public opinion.
 
Conclusion:  Platforms and the Future

On March 1, 2021, China’s first local laws and regulations to promote the development of the digital economy—"Regulations to Promote the Digital Economy of Zhejiang Province"—came into force. The regulations point out that the focus of the new digital economy is mainly on flexible employment, and that there is a dispute over whether the Internet platform should establish a labor relationship with these workers. It is difficult, in flexible employment, to participate in work-related injury insurance in accordance with current laws and regulations, and thus it is urgent to make up for the shortcomings of the system. Therefore, it is necessary to "actively explore flexible and diverse ways of employing workers," and platform operators can provide laborers with work injury insurance with lesser coverage 单险.

Previously, the construction industry, where informal subcontracting systems and work-related injuries are widespread, has made similar efforts and developed a more mature system. The "gig" model seen in platform labor has actually existed in various industries for a long time, but the rule makers have changed from visible contractors to untouchable large companies and elusive algorithms. In this process, whether individual workers are more vulnerable or have the space for formalized institutional protection depends on how we understand and deal with the relationship between the rules of the platform economy and social life. 
 
How should we avoid the labor problems, and the more serious systemic risks, created by Internet platform companies?  Progressive intellectual circles in Europe and the United States have already proposed cooperation between platforms or, even more radically, public ownership, but this communitarian ideal will be difficult to realize given the contradiction between liberal political ethics and the scale effects of the platforms. Given the network effect, the scale of the platform system and the scale of the life system tend to converge, and it is always difficult for small-scale cooperative platforms to compete with monopolistic platforms in the same industry unless they are completely outside the mainstream social system.

As I have pointed out in this paper, the practice and ideology of a platform labor system grounded in the dichotomy of freedom and control has strong roots in American history and values. There is even a radical critique that the latent ideology behind the technological products of the Internet, organized according to the rules of automation and outsourcing, grows out of the long history of slavery in capitalism; that both manufacturing and information industries are transferring the hardest work to other social groups (or to robots); and that the process of American globalization is a continuous transfer of low-welfare repetitive labor to the global South through information technology, which eventually backfires by creating a precariat at home.

Chinese Internet platform companies have also bought into the social imaginary behind this technical foundation, but so far there has been no massive wave of unemployment and social unrest, which largely stems from the fact that the still expanding Chinese platform economy is based on a completely different institutional and cultural soil from the United States, and the systemic risks that occur at a certain stage of industrial development are completely different. If you ask a middle-class American employed during the golden age of manufacturing, and a migrant worker who has experienced precarious employment on the assembly lines of the world's factories, I suspect that they will have different views of the precarious kind of work created by the platforms. The latter may see this flexible work model as a better option than the assembly line for a long time, unless he loses his hometown and becomes a complete urban proletarian.
 
The techno-centric way of thinking pretty much dominates the recent history of the world in which we are living. For the past thirty years, we believed that strengthening technological knowledge would provide solutions to social problems. And while today’s China has a complete system of independent technical talent and innovative enterprises in the field of information technology, the achievements and contradictions encountered in practice remind us that an Internet platform is not merely a set of algorithms and codes, but also a technology for organizing productive life, in which all rule-making is rooted in a specific historical consciousness and institutional conditions.

In the past, China has always played catch-up in the technology field, constantly transplanting the technological solutions of developed countries and their organizational models. But today, at least in the field of Internet platform technology, China has moved to the forefront of the world in algorithmic technology and related applications. Given the power of this field, which is still constantly changing in practice, can we walk a path that is different from techno-centrism and that will allow technology to serve society?
 
Notes

[1]周安安, “最高法终于推翻’996福报论,’ 却没能撕破早已布下的一张网,” 文化纵横/Beijing Cultural Review, published online on August 29, 2021.  Newspaper headlines or journal titles are often quite challenging to translate (or even to read, for the non-native speaker) as they aim to be some combination of concise, punchy, and amusing, which often lends them a cryptic quality.  A literal translation of the headline to this piece might be “The Supreme Court overturns the ‘996 is a blessing’ thesis, but was unable to tear through the net which has long since been cast.”  996 refers to the widespread practice of working six days a week from 9 a.m. to 9. p.m.  As in English, the “net” here refers both to the Internet and to the idea of a “web” or even a “trap” in which one can be ensnared, but I was unable to think of an English equivalent which would not have left the readers scratching their heads or thinking that the Chinese author (or more likely the editors of the review) are inept at writing headlines, which of course may be the case. 

[2]Translator’s note:  Hitch is the car-pooling service associated with Didi Chuxing, one of the largest of these platforms.  Presumably, other platforms offer similar services.  The idea is to “hitch a ride” with someone who is headed to the same destination, and the context is generally a longer journey than a Uber ride to another part of town.