Advertisements promise entrepreneurs magical defenses against nightmare scenarios.To get more shanghai subway, you can visit shine news official website.
In 2018, two new poster series colorfully bursting with depictions of urbanites in extremis appeared on Shanghai’s subways. They advertise competing mobile phone apps that allow users to check out suppliers, buyers, investment companies, and potential employers to suss out the likelihood of being cheated by them.
The ads point to two particularities of the Chinese late socialist economy: a high rate of entrepreneurship, and reluctance to turn to the judicial system when something goes wrong in business or at work. I heard stories reflecting both realities from my interlocutors at Jiangnan Design, a small design and construction business outside Shanghai. These narratives often ended with an exasperated but resigned claim of moral decline. Put simply one day by Meng, one of the company directors: “China doesn’t have good people anymore.”
Narratives of moral decline often say less about actual ethical practices than they do about what people fear and value. Here, I visually examine the subway ads through my interlocutors’ experience of entrepreneurship. From this perspective, the ads interpolate Shanghai middle-class commuters as business participants who must protect and advocate for themselves, using mobile technology rather than judicial recourse, amid a pervasive sense of moral loss.
The first ad series, for the app Tianyancha, visually poses nightmare scenarios that might befall the young, white-collar, and technologically savvy. The app name means something akin to “check from the eye in the sky,” suggesting that only from an all-knowing stance outside the self can a business’s reliability be known. The subjects of these ads did not just miss warning signs—they are victims.

In one ad, a young man in business attire views his laptop screen with a pained expression. In his leather- and marble-textured office, the man is clearly a white-collar worker (bailing), likely an entrepreneur:

It was no easy thing to sign a 300,000 RMB [44,000 USD] contract. But it was only after 9 months with no payment that I learned the company’s boss is a ‘deadbeat borrower’ (laolai).Adhered to the window on the metro door, the ad reflects white-collar commuters figuratively in its depiction of professionalism and vulnerability, and it also reflects them literally, their faces hovering in the glass near the young man’s image.

The ad also mirrors a threat my interlocutors at Jiangnan Design faced: suppliers and purchasers not following through on agreements. During my fieldwork, Jiangnan Design went through a legal proceeding with a subcontractor. This subcontractor had installed a component in one of Jiangnan Design’s buildings, and had done some of the electrical wiring incorrectly. The project was otherwise concluded, but Jiangnan Design’s directors refused to make the final payment to the subcontractor until they returned and fixed their work. Now there was a lawsuit.

And now it was over—and not with an outcome my interlocutors wanted to discuss. Director Meng brushed off my questions, saying only that judges were “the worst people in China,” attributing what he sees as a judicial failure, to ethical failure. Meng would prefer to avoid such judicial involvements in the first place.