Alienation
How did this come true? Firstly, Alibaba and its online shops offer extremely tempting discounts. Secondly, the fast convened online payment: Zhi Fu Bao. If you go to China, you will see it’s almost cashless and credit card-less, because mobile payment like Zhi Fu Bao has become the reality in China. The technology is used by 700 million people to pay each other. In addition, it is widely used not only by merchants, but from peer to peer, users are charged almost transaction-fee-free. Erich Fromm illustrated this phenomenon as Alienation, he further claims that man became homo consume (Fromm, 1981), or the alienated men in the affluent society. The homo consume(Fromm, 1981), is one “whose main interest becomes, aside from working from nine to five, to consume.” His attitude is that of “the eternal suckling” who “with the open mouth . . . consumes everything with voracity — liquor, cigarettes, movies, television, lectures, books, art exhibits, sex; everything is transformed into an article of consumption’. (Fromm, 1981)
Why China?
In the first place, Fromm suggested that modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who wants to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. As a result, Modern human is alienated from himself, and from their nature. In China, people from the bottom of society are actually longing for a sense of belonging, as Fromm (1941) illustrated:
The masochistic person, whether his master is an authority outside of himself or whether he has internalized the master as conscience or a psychic compulsion, is saved from making decisions, saved from the final responsibility for the fate of his self, and thereby saved from the doubt of what decision to make. He is also saved from the doubt of what the meaning of his life is or who ‘He’ is.
