One of the challenges of moving to China is that the country’s embrace of the concept of “cyber sovereignty” means that occasionally, going to the lavatory can be very boring.
Most of my favorite ways to fritter away time on my phone – on the train, waiting in a queue, while procrastinating at work – are difficult to access in China, and occasionally next to impossible.
Increased difficulty in recent months has led me to searching for replacements. After a failed experiment with literature (books don’t fit into your pocket, and it’s no fun to only read them in three minute bursts), I’ve been getting into perhaps the antithesis of literature – Chinese short video apps.
For the uninitiated, these apps show you short videos of about 30 seconds or less, and as you give the app feedback, it learns what kind of content you like and tries to show you more of the same, to keep you hooked. Though I’ve never given the app any feedback, as far as I’m aware, so I’m fairly sure that what it shows me is its general, basic offering.
These apps are a massive deal, with TikTok – known in China as Douyin – on track to become China’s first bonafide international internet hit, with millions of users overseas, and with various country-specific banks of content.
This makes it all the more surprising that almost half of what I was shown were titillating videos of Chinese (and occasionally blonde, Western) women. Women walking down the street. Women at the beach. Women at a water park. Women in the office. Women at a karaoke bar. Women eating ice cream. Women eating ice cream at a water park.
I mean, I wasn’t expecting high art, but still.
What strikes me about these (mostly quite boring) videos is first the extremely narrow range of body-types presented as attractive. The second is that quite a few of these women don’t seem to be aware they’re being filmed. Of course they might simply be pretending not to be aware, but at least some of these videos are definitely genuine creep-shots, which is extremely gross and says something about the priorities of the huge content removal teams working at these apps.
It also makes me wonder about the intended audience for these apps. Do people who aren’t attracted to women not need to waste their time? The apps seem to be narrowing their audience pretty drastically. I’ve never been shown a similar video of a man eating ice cream at a water park.
The second kind of video, which provides a fairly horrifying contrast to the videos of pale thin women going down water slides, are the violent ones. People falling off buildings. Construction workers beating each other with shovels. Men kicking dogs. And car crashes. So many car crashes. I can’t stress this enough, there are so many car crashes. To the point I’m starting to get freaked out by the prospect of millions of people constantly amusing themselves by watching car crashes.
Though frankly, this isn’t all that surprising in itself. I’ve seen trailers for WWII TV shows shown on the subway in Beijing containing levels of baddie-machine-gunning that would only be broadcast late in the evening back in the UK.
Then there are the sketches. Some of the most popular sketches, being done over and over again with a minor twist, seem to be ones which revolve around pinching someone on the rear end and then blaming it on someone else, humiliating people who litter (which I unconditionally support) and tricking your partner into thinking you’re cheating by putting a mannequin’s head next to you in bed.
The interesting thing here is that the comedy revolves around sex, even though it’s all pretty childish. Of course, a lot of lowest-common denominator comedy is like this, but it’s not like anything I’ve even seen on traditional TV, which generally seems to shy away from the topic. My favorite kind of video is the person-doing-a-mundane-thing-really-well genre. A waiter putting a lazy susan onto a banqueting table by spinning it on its edge. The busy cook throwing noodles across the kitchen into a pot of boiling water to save time. A truck driver deftly navigating a mountain road with a wildly overloaded cargo (this one was actually terrifying, as I expected it to be a car crash video).
I think the appeal here is that these people presumably aren’t really performing, it’s just that their real skills, developed in a lifetime of hard graft, have been captured on camera.
So, would I recommend these apps? They certainly offer a (fairly depressing) insight into the kind of content that people are jamming into their face – super short, super shallow, super generic. But if you’re looking to kill time, they’re kinda perfect. The nonstop flow of content is overwhelming, and even though I think most of it is trash, I’ve found myself watching ‘just one more video’ for 10 or 20 minutes.
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