For me, shared economy and community make sense. They take me back to my childhood…
I grew up in an engineers community in the middle of nowhere in Qingdao, a coastal town in north China. The factory my father worked for was part of the China Aerospace Technology Group, it recruited about 2000 engineers and 1000 supporting staff from all over China and dropped them in this hillside factory, the nearest bus stop was about an hour’s walk. There you could find communal canteen, sports ground, library, theatre, clinics, kindergarten, grocery shops, ice cream stand, water boiler and public bath. The factory would buy things such as coal, winter cabbage, apples and seafood in bulk and divided among all the families, especially before the Chinese New Year and Mid Autumn Festival.
Over the 18 years since I was born, we moved from one communal building to another as my father was promoted from apprentice to the chief engineer and general manager, all within 300 metres of the factory compound, until the housing market opened up and flats were made commercially available and tradable. My parents bought the three bedroom flat with its own kitchen and western style bathroom, by then I was already in university, staying in a 6 girls 4 bunkbed dormitory in Beijing.
I love the spacious flat my parents have, but I still misses the time when I grew up in the “Big Yard”, where everyone knew each other. Colleagues shared responsibilities to watch each other’s kids. All kids played together, the older ones helped the younger ones, while their parents were busy. I still remember we received a live chicken as a gift for Chinese New Year, but neither my father nor my mother had the heart or knew how to kill a chicken. We were saved to see that the big boss President Cai was sitting outside in the Yard plucking a chicken, so my parents asked for help. He was more than willing to demonstrate his commanding skills and ordered me to go to the boiler room to fetch a kettle of boiling water. I ran off with the kettle to avoid the bloody GOT scene. It was a safe and friendly environment for the kids(not the chicken), a miniature society that mimicked the real thing in life, and we learned the skills which later on helped us to adapt, it shaped our path and made who we are today…
I was a shy introvert bookworm, but because of this environment, I slowly built up my confidence and became more social. Looking back, as drastic changes happened in China, I have always been part of a certain community, the choir, dancing group, rugby clubs, dragon boat teams and of course the work units. It was imprinted in my genes, probably because of how I grew up - after all, the first 6 years has a great impact on your later life according to Floyd; but I couldn’t help wondering whether it was actually in the human genes, we are social animals that seek to realise our individual values.
The speed of development, eagerness for wealth and material abundance are the drivers of our economy, especially in the past 40 years in China. We came from nothing, my mother had to borrow money each month to buy soaps to wash our clothes; now the Chinese are buying half of the world…
Everybody I know has bought their own flat or flats with all the modern necessities. But let me ask you “how often do you use your washing machine?” Is it every week, every day, every hour? Of course not, most of the time it’s standing there getting extremely bored. Unless you have a big family and live in a rural area, why do you need the big refrigerator? Actually it’s the same case for most home appliances. As the family size get smaller, people are moving into flats for one, two or three. Most of their appliances are underused. It’s the same case with the cars and bikes, not to mention private jets, helicopters and yachts…
BBC’s documentary Planet Earth tells us that in the past 50 years, we have created more pollution than the previous mankind history added up together, more species extinguished because of that. Our material life has created this prosperity that environment could not handle. As humans consume the world in the manner of the Last Supper, there is something that we can do to delay the dooms day or save ourself and the environment.
It’s called “Sharing”. Pool our resources together, maximise the usage, productivity and efficiency, consume less and in a more sustainable way. To do that, we need to recreate the communities, as you cannot do it alone…
That’s why I like the shared economies in principle, not the faux, the real thing. I like the concepts of Uber, Airbnb, Mobike and WeWork, and I use them for my local and international travels and work and leisure.
