China's Digital Nomads Trade Mega-Cities for Backpacker Havens
After a hard day's work, programmer Richard Hao powers down his laptop in a cafe overlooking Dali's picturesque lake and drinks in the view. Like a growing number of digital nomads in China, he's turned his back on big-city living and moved to the tourist hub in Yunnan province, famed for its snowcapped mountains, ancient temples and pagodas.
“I'm working on a normal job with relatively fixed hours,” said Hao, who's employed by a technology firm in Shenzhen, a city of more than 17 million people about 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) to the southeast. “It's just that I don't have to go to an office and I have some flexibility to do my own thing.”
China is catching up with the global trend of tech-savvy workers choosing cheaper and prettier locations to base themselves — a lifestyle that's gained traction since the Covid-19 pandemic prompted a rethink of work-life balance.
The backdrop to digital nomadism in China, however, is unique. It offers a middle path between two quite extreme attitudes to work — the “996” culture prevalent in some tech firms of toiling 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week, and the protest culture of doing as little work as possible, known as “tang ping” or lying flat.
Proponents like Daniel Ng, who runs a co-working space in Dali, believes a happy medium can help reduce a youth jobless rate that's hovering around 20% as the economy slows. An influx of creative, entrepreneurial people that typically include livestreamers, vloggers, online teachers and tech support workers can also help local authorities revitalize towns depleted of tourists by the pandemic.
But the future looks far from certain. As big tech firms such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. lay off thousands of staff,
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