Editor's Letter

If the pandemic has contributed anything,it’s the acceleration of data and “smart” technologies in China.Here,we grudgingly accept mandatory health code scanning as a fact of life,but most of us don’t think twice about scanning a code to order inside a restaurant;or are even glad to avoid having to touch a physical menu,or make awkward small talk with the server,in exchange for letting our devices know where we’ve been and what we like to eat.

For all that we complain about the loss of our anonymity and autonomy online,we’re willingly providing most of the data required for it to happen,and it’s becoming nearly impossible to enjoy modern conveniences without doing so (though some people are still trying,as we discover through one of our interviews with a “digital hermit”).Therefore,it’s up to businesses and governments pushing for the popularization of these technologies to be accountable to the people they are meant to serve.Is that happening? In our cover story this issue,we explore this question from several angles,from high-profile scandals where local governments and big businesses manipulated Covid and consumer data for their own ends,to “smart cities” and “digital villages” where technologies create new problems while they solve existing ones,and the smartphone-less population left behind by these revolutionary changes.

In our feature stories,we ponder the question of what China should do with its vast “industrial heritage” of abandoned factories,and see how pilgrimage traditions live on in the modern day,for religious or other reasons.Elsewhere in this active issue,we look at how women are taking a more visible role in newly popular leisure sports such as Ultimate Frisbee and rock-climbing,and how amateur scuba divers operate in the legal gray zone of diving bans while pushing for better,safer places to practice their sport.The state of crime fiction,the rural stereotypes in films about China’s northwestern regions,and a review of works by ethnic photographers challenging exotic representations of their ethnic group round off our culture coverage for the issue.