At the core of contemporary China is a contradiction: it’s the world’s most prominent Communist-ruled country, yet it’s found steadily increasing affluence in recent decades by embracing a degree of entrepreneurship and market competition that would make Ronald Reagan drool in envy.
In some cases, all that capitalism can lead to situations in the People’s Republic that sound like a bit like unintentional parody.
Recent video shared by China Insider — an outlet co-produced by anti-China media groups NTD and The Epoch Times, for what it’s worth — shows an incredible video of a woman forced to scan a QR code with her phone in order to activate a toilet paper dispenser.
After scanning the code, the woman has the choice to either pay a few cents for some bathroom tissue — or, strikingly, watch an ad. The bizarre mechanism might be vaguely dystopian, but it’s admittedly pretty seamless from a user point of view, taking just a few seconds of effort.
Context is iffy. The outlet fails to disclose where the video was taken, so we have no way of knowing whether this is a private McDonald’s, a public-private mall, or a public subway station.
“This system is designed to cut down waste — some people would abuse free paper before,” CI writes under the video.
It’s plausible, though. Toilet paper thievery, surprisingly, is a longstanding social issue in China.
A 2017 story by the New York Times details the situation: for years, park managers in high-traffic tourist areas have scratched their heads as their stores of bathroom tissue were rapidly depleted. But tourists weren’t the problem, one manager told the NYT — instead, it turned out to be “local residents” taking advantage of the free supply of toiletries.
“The people who steal toilet paper are greedy,” a service worker named He Zhiqiang told the NYT at the time. “Toilet paper is a public resource. We need to prevent waste.”
Another source told the newspaper that China’s decades of poverty have left some people overly anxious to take advantage of publicly available goods.
A related bit of context: public toilet paper isn’t a given in the People’s Republic; most public bathrooms operate on a system of BYOTP, meaning that well-outfitted restrooms are even more likely to become targets.
While that’s said to be slowly changing, at least in tourist-heavy areas, it seems adtech might be part of the mitigation effort until everyone learns to share.
More on adtech: Samsung Announces Plans to Plaster Your Smart Fridge With Digital Advertisements
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