Covid-19 has transformed China’s remote work culture, but who can afford this lifestyle and how does it impact local communities?
As the camera pans over lush green rice paddies, settling on a range of mountains decked with rays of sunlight piercing a sky of fluffy white clouds, 30-year-old Fu Yeye provides a whimsical voice-over: “With 2,000 yuan in Dali, you can buy an idyllic life that you couldn’t get for even 10,000-plus in Beijing.” The scene, posted on Fu’s account on popular youth lifestyle app Xiaohongshu (RED), switches to views over Dali’s Erhai Lake at sunset, and Fu’s rented courtyard where she lives with her boyfriend and dog, “Bunny.”
It’s a bucolic existence, Fu’s voice-over explains, away from the pollution, traffic, and crowds of China’s biggest cities. “People ask why digital nomads are so happy; it’s because we live next to green fields and pristine water every day, and spend on average 3,000 to 6,000 a month. I’m emotionally and spiritually wealthy, and my wallet is full too.”
The stunning surroundings of Dali, Yunnan province, have long made it a tourism hot spot, but now it’s also increasingly a magnet for remote workers like Fu keen to escape fast-paced, high-pressure white-collar life in China’s biggest cities. By combining remote working with travel, living in cheap locations, and working via the internet, these “digital nomads” are ditching their office jobs in increasing numbers. Covid-19 further fueled the trend, with around 200 million people forced into remote working during the pandemic’s peak and some desperate to leave crowded urban areas with higher risk of large outbreaks.
But despite Fu’s utopian social media content, the digital nomad life is far more complex than influencers and entrepreneurs would have you believe. In the US, most digital nomads quit the lifestyle within three years, according to a 2020 report by MBO Partners. In China, pulling up roots and living on the go is a risk only some can afford—mainly affluent, educated, unmarried (or at least childless) urbanites. Keeping income flowing when you work remotely is also a challenge, and China’s location-based social security schemes leave this floating population uninsured in their temporary homes.
What’s more, it’s unclear what benefits digital nomads bring to the communities they inhabit: They don’t stay permanently, they often work and generate value for companies based elsewhere, and their presence may drive up the local cost of living.
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Remote Freedom: The Cost of Utopia for China’s Fledgling Digital Nomads is a story from our issue, “Kinder Cities.” To read the entire issue, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine.
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