High-tech Propaganda as an Immersive Experience

Nestled among the hills of sprawling Chongqing in the hustle and bustle of an artsy student district in mid-February 2017, an electric vehicle was parked on the main thoroughfare. On the side of the van, a large LED screen looped videos of environmental scenes, and passers-by stopped to watch pixilated green mountains, cascading waterfalls and blue skies in the midst of the urban fabric. Although the vehicle streaming nature scenes at first glance might seem like the work of an installation artist, all the videos were public service announcements about China's green transition and official government propaganda of the People's Republic of China.

The e-vehicle disseminated propaganda as an immersive, even avant-garde experience, mobilising high-tech infrastructure in ways that blur the line between public service and personal entertainment. Such displays form digital updates to the ubiquitous notice boards and mounted loudspeakers used by the state during the Maoist periods of high socialism (1949–1976) and the ensuing Market Reform era (since 1978). These analogue mouthpieces served the lowest levels of government – urban neighbourhoods and rural village committees – by broadcasting legal statutes and policy information to citizens. While these forms of broadcast persist in most parts of the People's Republic of China, their emphases had shifted from a decade ago when family planning, inheritance law and economic information dominated these spaces. During fieldwork in 2016–2019, public spaces frequently displayed information about carbon footprints and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as energy efficiency and recycling methods, and even flagship environmental restoration projects in far-flung reaches of the country.

Chinese governance, at local and national levels, has become increasingly inventive in fostering so-called ‘ecological consciousness’ (shengtai yishi) among citizens, moving beyond poster campaigns and public billboards into online spaces where games, especially as apps, abound that promote a greener way of life. Building on the logic of the video installation above, initiatives to trace and offset carbon footprints proliferate in these virtual spaces. Both local state bureaus encouraging household emissions reductions and nationwide corporations participating in carbon markets are getting in the game and developing carbon apps. Much like the balloons in the advertisement, the apps estimate greenhouse gases emitted in everything from everyday kitchen appliances to private car rides, and incentivise emissions avoidance, reduction and offsetting of greenhouse gases through sustainable behaviour like bicycle commuting and afforestation drives.

This governance approach intersects with broader state strategies of moral righteousness and technologically mediated policy enforcement. The integration of digital technologies and market reforms in China sparks a contestation over what constitutes moral behaviour regarding the environment, revealing a distinct form of green subjectivity that blends elements of neosocialism with digital innovation. This challenges the idea that governance through individualised accountability, on the one hand, and resource optimisation through digital data, on the other, are specific to neoliberalism. Key questions emerge around citizen perceptions of environmental stewardship and the implications of state involvement in promoting individual responsibility. It also raises questions about the role of platform companies in shaping environmental initiatives and green development.

This research is based on twelve months of fieldwork in the People's Republic of China between 2016 and 2019. Initially, I focused on carbon experts involved in green finance, especially local experiments in emissions exchanges and the nascent national carbon market launched by the central government. These form part of the state's wider socio-technical promise to realise ‘ecological civilisation’ (shengtai wenming) in China and beyond (see Hansen et al 2018). I eventually broadened my perspective on carbon, examining its value beyond markets. I considered carbon's social and cultural value in everyday understandings of atmospheric pollution and climate change, as well as its political value in performing state environmental restitution and environmental governance. Methodologically, this project involved ‘following’ and ‘tracing’ carbon as a relationally constituted and contextually situated object, one that had to be cut from the network rather than encountered as a stable object in a bounded fieldsite.

In this article, I focus on participant observation of and interviews conducted with users of environmental apps in China, particularly the carbon footprint and afforestation programme Ant Forest that is hosted by Alipay. Alipay is one of the world's largest digital payment platforms. Using Alipay on their smartphones or computers, consumers can pay for services and products online and in physical stores. These include making payments for online shopping, utility bills, transportation, subscriptions, tickets, media and more. Since 2016, the Ant Forest feature within the Alipay app has also tracked and rewarded users’ individual green behaviour and sustainable consumption choices with afforestation credits. Ant Forest thereby streamlines the selection of eco-friendly options by providing a user-friendly platform that simplifies the tracking of environmentally conscious actions, for both digital interactions and real-world tasks. The app contributes to automating moral decision-making by supplanting the tangible and ethical effort required to achieve a certain mindset and lifestyle with contradictory outcomes on the ground.

Digital initiatives like Ant Forest quantify the energy use and carbon emissions in users’ everyday activities, and thereby recalibrate the responsibility for planetary greenhouse gas emissions to individual citizen-consumers. This transfer of climate change accountability from nation-states and industries to individual consumers represents a fundamental shift in environmental governance. It reflects a broader trend of technomoral governance worldwide, where moral imperatives are enforced through technology on individualised subjects (Trnka and Trundle 2017). The Chinese state's involvement in these initiatives prompts questions about ideological and governmental motivations behind this reconfiguration of environmental responsibility, adding to Foucauldian notions of governmentality, with a turn towards ecological commitments based on digital infrastructure.

By displacing the politics of moral and ethical responsibility for the environment into the technical realm, individual carbon apps proliferate in China under country-specific conditions in building and enabling digital infrastructure through bureaucratic coding. However, these developments chime with wider global shifts towards technomoral governance. Drawing on Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma (2016), this article examines the state not as a coherent entity, but a hegemonic project, and investigates the displacement of the political from left and right into a realm of moral righteousness. Bornstein and Sharma's research into how the Indian state engages with civil society groups reveals two simultaneous state effects: on the one hand, governance becomes infused with moral principles that are translated, and enacted, through technical efficiency and legal expertise. On the other hand, the emerging orientation of institutions (including the state, corporations, social movements and NGOs) toward shared moral projects blurs the boundaries between them, making them permeable and intersecting. Although Bornstein and Sharma's work places this transition squarely within a neoliberal order, similar transformations emerge in the formally communist People's Republic of China.

To bring these developments to life, the next section introduces the world of Alipay's carbon app.

Waking up to the Green Chinese Dream

In 2017, Nianzhen woke up every morning at 6:59 to the alarm on her mobile phone. Rolling over in bed, she reached for her phone and turned off the alarm. Barely awake, she opened the app Alipay, China's largest e-commerce and third-party payment platform. Yet Nianzhen did not begin the day with a groggy shopping spree. Instead, she entered Ant Forest. Her screen filled with a digital tree nursery where she was growing a virtual tree. Bubbles hovered over her plant, representing the ‘green energy’ (lüse nengyuan) she accrued from yesterday's ‘low carbon activities’ (ditan huodong). At 7 o'clock on the dot, the energy was released for harvest, and Nianzhen immediately clicked on the bubbles before some ‘pickpocket’ (xiaotou) could pilfer her energy. She watched as the energy generated by yesterday's online transactions flowed into her tree. Nourished by this boost, the tree bounced for joy as it stretched upward into the deep blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds.

Nianzhen headed over to her friends’ tree nurseries, stealing a few grams from a distant acquaintance's untapped energy and sharing some of her own energy with a friend using a virtual watering can. She also took a little scroll through the ledger accounting for yesterday's green energy points from carbon savings: taking the metro – 46 grams, walking around town – 38 grams, choosing the no-utensils option on her lunch delivery −16 grams, foregoing the plastic bag at the convenience store – 21 grams, paying for her electricity bill online – 262 grams. Adding up to a grand total of 383 grams – a good haul for an average day. On the app's integrated map function, Nianzhen also checked up on ‘her’ two real-life trees that had already been planted in the Gobi Desert as part of the corporate social responsibility scheme that matched her energy points with afforestation credits.

Since August 2016, Alipay not only issues every user with a cash and a credit account, but also an environmental account (Xinhua 2018a). In Ant Forest, consumer behaviour tracked through the app awards ‘low carbon’ and other ‘sustainable’ lifestyle choices like using public transport, paying for bills electronically and reducing packaging with ‘green energy points’. Like Nianzhen, users feed these points into virtual trees. Once the user has nourished the seedling into a sizable on-screen sapling, they can convert their tree from pixel to plant. Alipay matches the digitally generated tree by planting a real tree, usually through a partnership with a local NGO (Xinhua 2018b). In September 2017, Alipay also added the less green energy point intensive option of ‘adopting’ five square metres of conservation land, also managed by NGO partners (Xinhua 2018b). In addition to visiting your forest on-screen, since 2017 users can track their trees by visiting satellite-image-generated maps of their location re- inforced through field monitors, or ‘electronic scarecrows’ as Alipay calls the solar- panel-powered cameras, provided by XAG, one of the world's leading agricultural drone companies (XAG 2020).

Nianzhen was not alone in Ant Forest. According to the UNFCCC Climate Action Awards summary, by August 2019 Ant Forest had garnered over 500 million users, planted more than 100 million real trees in Northwest China, an area covering 112,000 hectares, and protected a further 12,000 hectares of conservation land (UNFCCC 2019). According to the report, Ant Forest had created 400,000 job opportunities and generated 60 million RMB (equivalent to 8.4 million USD), while additionally helping farmers develop organic agricultural products and connect with partners through the e-commerce platform Alibaba (UNFCCC 2019).

As an app for online transactions, Alipay accumulates extensive data on consumer behaviour that can be mobilised in many ways. This oversight into all areas of an account holder's digital payments makes estimating the carbon footprints in payments, travel and consumption possible. To further incentivise individual carbon accounting, the app also turns the Ant Forest account into a place for virtual socialising. In addition to stealing or sharing energy points, users can pool their points to plant trees together, and rally around their school class or family group tree.

The mobile phone payment platform giant Alipay has around 900 million users (Zhai and Zhu 2020), making it one of the world's most used apps. This results in the vast scale of the in-app feature of Ant Forest. Yet there are many similar smaller carbon tracking and accounting projects across China, from state-sponsored schemes to institute low-carbon-city policies to charity-based carbon afforestation projects through apps (see Bruckermann 2022). However, Alipay's Ant Forest is by far the most successful, and addictive, gamification of carbon footprints on the market, although users often self-satirise their accumulation of ‘good deeds’ through the app. While Ant Forest was initially separate from the state, green governance increasingly met trustworthy citizenship designations in official channels through the app.

On 23 October 2018, Alipay signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the National Forestry Bureau's Afforestation Committee and the China Green Foundation for ‘Internet + National Compulsory Tree Planting’ (Xinhua 2018a). The news coverage of this event drew attention to the revival of the 1982 State Council directive that each citizen fulfil an annual tree planting quota. But with a new digitalised twist. Under this agreement, users who plant three virtual Ant Forest trees can receive a ‘Responsible Citizen Tree Planting Certificate’, officially recognising their fulfilment of the obligation to plant three to five trees annually (Xinhua 2018a).

Following this brief excursion into Alipay's vision for the future of their virtual forestry programme, the following sections trace broader shifts towards quantification in environmental governance worldwide, before delving into the specific ethnographic context in which these systems of individuated accountability for carbon emerged in China. I argue that these initiatives form part of a broader governmental response to ‘moral crisis’ in global capitalism, aiming to instil moral responsibility and ecological subjectivity through digital data.

Environmental Governance and Carbon Metrics

Global governance, including environmental governance, increasingly relies on evidence-based paradigms such as quantification, transparency and accountability. Policy experts believe that following these principles enhances political accountability and promotes effective governance, from planning to execution. Neoliberal programmes have embraced auditing and consulting, frequently enforced through metrics, to discipline entities to achieve targets, goals and quotas. Moral initiatives are thereby converted into technical language for practical implementation, through state adaptation of policy and law (Bornstein and Sharma 2016). Individual responsibility associated with management practices is often linked with the rise of auditing (Strathern 2000), consulting (Shore and Wright 2018) and quantification (Rottenburg and Merry 2015), especially in the digital age of big data and transparency (Trnka and Trundle 2017). In such contexts, infopower, an emerging form of ‘biopower’, not only individuates and aggregates administrative functions through digital metrics and large data sets, but also automates them (Koopman 2019).

Automation, in the sense of substituting human effort and reasoning with feedback-regulated devices, is not a new phenomenon (Lowrie 2018). In the past, these machines mostly executed particular, predictable, repetitive activities, utilising analogue mechanisms like gears, flywheels and ropes (Lowrie 2018). The novel aspect of contemporary automation lies in breakthroughs in digital processing for the direction, supervision and communication of information, what Lowrie calls ‘algorithmic assemblages’ (2018: 351). The efficacy of algorithmic automation not only results from its capacity to process vast amounts of data, but also ‘its ability to manipulate adjacent computational routines, material infrastructures, and human beings’ (Lowrie 2018: 351). Although Lowrie's call to understand algorithms on their own terms is well taken, in what follows I examine the new forms of labour and morality that emerged in close proximity to, and in response to, the digital infrastructure developed by Alipay.

From water (Anand 2017) and electricity management (Degani 2017) to carbon capture (Günel 2019; Valderrama 2023), methods to measure, regulate and monetise natural resources are expanding globally, as they become digitalised and automated. In international environmental governance, the calculation of green credits, and particularly carbon metrics, creates convenient units for distributing political accountability and environmental responsibility, as carbon ledgers, accounting and trading mechanisms abound (Dalsgaard 2014, Whitington 2016). The predominant use of quantifiable data by global experts carries the risk of marginalising the diversity of lived experiences and confining their relevance to local scopes (Walker-Crawford 2023). While the temptation arises to understand environmental governance as a form of internalised ecological geopolitics, Arun Agrawal (2005) shows that the specific forms of ‘environmentality’ found in diverse environmental subjectivities do not just replicate global forms, but emerge from practices and ecologies on the ground.

Carbon's role in facing climate change is, of course, pivotal, serving as a measurable standard for assessing greenhouse gas emissions and the changing chemical composition in the atmosphere. The climate crisis elevates the significance of carbon limits to planetary survival, potentially justifying policies that might otherwise seem too invasive (Günel 2019). Moreover, carbon metrics obscure differences in accountability and redress for climate change, equating individuals, corporations and governments, while overlooking varied historical roles and possibilities (Dalsgaard 2014). The carbon footprint metaphor also positions humans as potential planetary saviours, which belies the differentiated responsibilities, and even culpabilities, in environmental degradation and climate crisis (Swyngedouw 2013).

In their integration into digital infrastructures, new forms of ‘virtual nature’, ‘nature 2.0’ and even ‘wilderness 2.0’ are taking hold in conservation efforts worldwide. These terms refer to understandings of the natural environment that are created, hosted and altered in computational, networked and online ecologies (see Büscher 2016; Igoe 2013; Stinson 2017). Of course, understandings of ‘nature’ have long been mediated by representational forms that originate in diverse sources, from artwork, literature and religious worldviews to technological interventions and scientific experimentation (Weller 2006). However, advances in computational environments have increasingly entangled the mediated concept of nature with digitalisation processes, catalysing its commodification through corporate platforms.

Examples of ‘virtual nature’ are proliferating, including the digital gamification of environmental knowledge and behaviour through apps and games, green platform activism tied to corporate social responsibility, and prosumer conservation practices that link online clicks to offline improvements (Büscher 2016; Igoe 2013; Stinson 2017). However, most developers and users of these digital infrastructures are situated in cosmopolitan centres, predominantly in the ‘Global North’, with regions of the world beyond these hegemonic centres merely serving as sites for environmental redress, or as stages for the spectacle of ecological redemption (Büscher 2016; Igoe 2013). One of the specificities of the Alipay app, and Ant Forest, is the wide reach of users, both in urban and rural sites across the People's Republic of China and the globe, for instance in the Philippines (see Dal Maso 2022; UNFCCC 2019).

The art of using these environmental online platforms and applications among urban, middle and upper class prosumers enmeshes recreation and work in ‘virtual labour’, as they travel and explore, but also document in photos, videos and blog posts (Stinson 2017). Yet, as James Stinson (2017) points out, these digital infrastructures do not arise from the liberal tendencies of outdoor enthusiasts, but are ‘promoted systematically by state organizations, non-governmental conservation organizations, and private corporations’ as part of global neoliberal governance.

Thus, the Chinese case of blurring of motives between state agendas, private profit-making and the accumulation of ethical ‘value’ for consumers is not unique, as the abstractions of creating a ‘virtual’ nature through carbon calculations elsewhere reveal (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014). Moreover, this article follows Bornstein and Sharma's (2016) understanding of the state as a hegemonic endeavour rather than a unified entity. I also share their focus on how techno-bureaucratic coding of morality displaces conventional political alignments and how the state's interaction with NGOs, civil society groups and other non-state actors merges institutional identities.

In China, these recalibrations through carbon unfold in parallel with state projects aiming to uphold morality. They deflect carbon responsibilities onto individual citizens by leveraging digital mechanisms and citizen participation in a technomoral governance that goes beyond a neoliberal context, taking on specificities in the service of a neosocialist green agenda.

Moral Crisis and Automating Social Management

In China, the fusing of a politics of moral righteousness and techno-bureaucratic coding is intimately connected with historical circumstances. In the wake of the moral vacuum left by Maoism, the Chinese Communist Party has, since the 1980s, attempted to establish various unifying programmes of public morality, involving a succession of policies to ‘civilize’ China (Dynon 2008) amid global capitalism. As marketisation deepened with the departure from Maoist collectivism, feelings of moral decline and even immorality took hold, as ethical judgements in individual life choices proliferated (e.g. Osburg 2013; Oxfeld 2010; Yan 2011). In increasingly anonymous market transactions, especially online, accusations of immorality proliferated (see Bruckermann 2021; Yan 2011).

Alongside market reforms, the state enacted new legal frameworks that remain deeply intertwined with, and reliant on, the Communist Party's influence (Creemers 2018). As a result, formal legal proceedings are often unpredictable, complex and discouraging, with many disputes still settled by state bureaucrats within local government offices or Communist Party officials in the courtroom. Although significant reforms to local governance bodies, such as rural village committees and urban neighbourhood associations, have reduced their role as the ultimate arbiters of injustice claims, they persist as key entities for enforcing order (Tomba 2014). Their contemporary modes of governance can include new forms of surveillance, for instance through digital cameras, but also new kinds of incentives, such as permanent residency status in urban areas, to promote self-regulation, yet disproportionately affect marginalised groups (Kim 2021).

Defining the state in contemporary China has become increasingly difficult, as government levels collide and boundaries between state and non-state actors blur (Nonini 2008). While the central state often makes sweeping policy pronouncements, provincial or municipal governments turn these into concrete policies that are then, in turn, implemented by local governments, sometimes reaching all the way down to village committees or neighbourhood associations (Heilmann and Perry 2011). Moreover, the distinction between government offices, infrastructural projects and technical enterprises unravels as mixed ownership between state-owned and state–private hybrids emerges, with government institutions acting as key shareholders (Creemers 2018).

This nested encompassment of political bureaucracy sits uneasily with the goal of state integration across the country's vast geography, which is becoming increasingly connected and dynamic, from migration and mobility to telecommunication and digitalisation (Greenhalgh 2020). Population management in the Foucauldian sense has shifted in the People's Republic of China, broadly from policies focused on location to quantity, and then to quality (Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005). First, the population was governed through citizen location with the household registration system, established in the late 1950s and gradually loosened from the late 1970s; second, an emphasis on population quantity emerged through family planning policies, which were most restrictive from the late 1970s to the mid-2010s; finally, third, the differentiation of citizens through ‘human quality’ (suzhi) since the mid-1980s focused on factors like educational attainment, health status, rural or urban origins, as well as deportment, behaviour and taste (Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005).

The recent turn towards digital bureaucratic infrastructure marks a new phase in Chinese governance. While earlier policies remained focused on optimisation of a statistical population as aggregates of individual data points, the emergence of ‘grid management systems’ (wanggehua guanli) as tools for automated ‘social management’ (shehui guanli) aim to push society towards governing itself (Hoffman 2017). For instance, many Chinese cities manage internal migration by using individual point systems that determine access to social services and real estate permits, constituting a dynamic, responsive and largely digitalised bureaucratic infrastructure that enforces docility and self-discipline among citizens (Kim 2021).

Various Social Credit Systems have evolved throughout the country, partly in response to outlines for a central system first proposed in 2014. As Rogier Creemers (2018) points out, analysts of the Social Credit System must separate the centralised system (run through the People's Bank of China Blacklist) from localised experiments with social scoring (e.g. the city of Hangzhou, a high-tech hub that coincidentally is also the founding city of Alibaba Group) and private social creditworthiness (e.g. Alibaba's Sesame Credit scheme). A 2018 survey found that various schemes associated with Social Credit Systems actually enjoyed widespread approval among users who did not primarily associate them with government monitoring, but viewed them as tools to improve living standards, bridge gaps in governance and regulation and create a more trustworthy, law-abiding society (Kostka 2019).

The Covid-19 pandemic provided a kind of ‘stress test’ for this digital bureaucracy, as the government waived corporate debts and promoted relief efforts as part of their Social Credit System initiatives (Knight and Creemers 2021). As elsewhere, entire factories, neighbourhoods and even cities were subjected to strict quarantine conditions (Xiang 2020), but in China violations to policies like breaking quarantine risked blacklisting (Knight and Creemers 2021). Moreover, the introduction of health codes sparked debate over government intrusion (Courtney 2020), climaxing in protests against strict Covid policies in 2022. In his recent overview of various initiatives associated with the Social Credit System, Vincent Brussee (2023) points out that the People's Bank of China has, in fact, not only terminated the involvement of private social credit initiatives in the unified scheme, but central state regulations have limited or ended most local government scoring pilot programmes.

Beyond the state, corporations in China, and elsewhere, mobilise social scoring to establish trust between users, for instance in market transactions on their platforms. Financial institutions also establish individual ratings to evaluate clients’ creditworthiness. Chinese network marketers can utilise these online scores to boost their self- confidence in defiance of adverse associations with indebted relatives or predatory loan sharks (Bruckermann 2021), while Chinese participants on peer-to-peer credit platforms grapple with assessing the risks of potential lenders and borrowers while dreaming of ‘financial inclusion’ (Rao 2021). In China, gamification of these forms of scoring also occurs in social networking apps, or even on news sites, to bind customer loyalty (McDonald and Dan 2022).

Acting as a kind of environmental scoring mechanism, Alipay's Ant Forest is most appropriately contextualised within these social and financial scoring schemes, as it mobilises many elements of ‘virtual nature’ on social media through its carbon account, yet also integrates the ecological footprint within a digital infrastructure for cash and credit services. Nonetheless, it thereby reinforces state programmes of green development and promises of a coming ecological civilisation. While Chinese governance links ecological consciousness with the moral worth of neosocialist citizens, Ant Forest promotes ethical behaviour through individualised green credits. These initiatives contribute to state goals for ‘automating morality’ by integrating digital data, desirable behaviour and networked trust for national progress. This chimes with the Communist Party's efforts to assert its role in upholding morality, while leveraging digital mechanisms and citizen participation in technomoral governance.

Returning to the game of scoring green credits makes these developments concrete in relation to ecological values and green behaviour, embedding this digital infrastructure in how moral lives actually unfold ethnographically.

Playing with Green Development

In Shanxi Province in north-central China, terraces cut across the crumbling ochre loess soil, sustaining hardy and drought-resistant crops like millet and maize on dramatic ravines, often under a sky tinted grey by pollution rather than moisture. The landscape bears the scars of ecological degradation, from hillsides denuded of forests to the gaping holes of open-cast mines, as well as pockets of industrial furnaces for steel, iron and petrochemical production. This formed the uneasy backdrop of an agrarian landscape overlaid with an industrial economy. Environmental degradation was further exacerbated by the transition from the intensive yet outdated Maoist industrial policy to a coal and energy boom in the Reform Era. Increasingly, the province faced the challenge of tackling a pollution crisis, with decarbonisation efforts attempting to steer it toward a more service- and finance-oriented economy. The unlikely enthusiasm for Ant Forest among some of Shanxi's residents, accustomed to landscapes marred by extraction and pollution, aligns with a growing desire for a reclaimed, green identity, despite their history tethered to energy and heavy industries.

For instance, Sandan, the daughter of a stone quarry worker and a corn farmer was employed in a coal washing station. Her personal trajectory mirrored the regional aspiration to move beyond industrial labour to the service sector, especially through tourism, although this transition was fraught with hurdles (see Bruckermann 2019). After graduating from upper middle school, Sandan had worked as hotel service personnel and married a coal truck driver in the township capital. After their son was born, she found a job in a coal washing station, a relatively technical job that mainly involved weighing coal and measuring its quality.

Sandan was an avid Ant Forest user and enjoyed the playfulness and exchanges with others. As she pointed out, the mini-app resembled a game that was wildly popular in the late 2000s, Pleasure Farm (kaixin nongchan), where users became virtual agricultural producers, tending to gardens, fields and flocks. At the time, many farmers’ children in the Shanxi countryside were hooked on the app, spending hours raising virtual livestock, while adamantly rejecting actual agricultural work. Sandan's neighbour, a middle-aged Shanxi farmer, complained: ‘Young people today are so busy raising virtual trees, chickens, and toads online, they have no time to raise their own children!’

Sandan showed me where ‘her’ trees were planted in the Gobi Desert by virtually pinpointing them through the integrated map function in the app. She joked that she wanted me to go to the desert and find her tree. She then added more earnestly that I could at least check if the project was real and not a scam. Nonetheless, Sandan was aware of the contradictions of using the app in Shanxi, reflecting on the futility of watering her digital tree while the surrounding forest area burned down due to lack of rainfall and dwindling groundwater supplies.

We reminisced about harvesting corn in the dusty crumbling loess terraces in the late summer of 2009, when I was in Shanxi for my doctoral fieldwork and Sandan was heavily pregnant. She sighed and said that was certainly ‘arduous labour’ (kunan de laodong) and lamented that such hard work continued in the village despite its marketing status as an ‘eco-village’ (shengtai nongcun). Now, villagers were also selling green products and handmade crafts as part of sustainable tourism, and most of her old neighbours and classmates worked for a tourism development company, or sold goods online through e-commerce. Sandan pointed out that, being stuck in the countryside, online exchanges kept her and her friends connected. Asked about the explicit turn to the ‘green’ dimensions of these transactions, she said that this was part of ‘looking towards the future’ (yuqi weilai).

As for the labour afforestation workers did in the Mongolian desert, Sandan saw the app as part of a rural poverty alleviation programme, though run by big tech rather than the government. This assessment underlines how the lines between state policy and corporate interests have become less clear in the Chinese reform era (Nonini 2008), especially as Chinese corporations take to the global stage (Lee 2019). Although Sandan saw the outcome of Alipay's green transformation as potentially positive, she empathised with the difficulty of planting trees in the dusty desert.

The digital process of green subjectivity-making had ambiguous effects on users, who became addicted while keeping a humorous distance. Maintaining the work of the app as good for the future, while seeing her own rural community deteriorating from environmental destruction, put Sandan in an uneasy position. Her project of moral subjecthood as part of the young digital generation stood at odds with another form of ethical morality encapsulated by her neighbour's commitment to rural and local relationships. Another dimension of morality emerged in discussions with app users over the inequalities in the value of environmental labour within the app and the types of morality they enacted in relation to environmental behaviour, green consciousness and the rural–urban divide.

The Work of Green Avatars

Turning to the actual afforestation workers in the Chinese countryside, Alipay promoted a win-win situation for the rural workteams as green avatars. Online blogs, posts, videos and even live-streams showcased the (predominantly female) workers whose daily grind out in the desert was intermittently broken by well-deserved breaks, where they performed joyful dances before passing around juicy watermelons as part of their wholesome lunch breaks on the golden dunes. Most of these women were middle-aged former farmers, often with children who had moved to the city for study or work, whose husbands frequently worked as industrial workers or migrant labourers far from the arid dunes. Alipay's promotional materials rarely delved into the details of any specific afforestation worker.

On 30 April 2019, Alipay published a video of the tree planter and grassroots writer Yang Shenghua on various social media platforms (Alipay 2019). They portrayed Yang, a fifty-five-year-old woman who has followed her dream of becoming an author while working for Ant Forest's afforestation team, combining her love for beauty in all forms, from floral language to painted nails, with the joys of planting the desert. Her income, however, was not spent on frivolous self-indulgences but went toward supporting her children, especially her daughters, to receive a good education and make the family proud.

Tree planters in the Wuwei area, where I conducted fieldwork in 2019, were usually not working directly for Ant Forest but for sub-contracting forestry bureaus, afforestation companies or green foundations. Wuwei was once central to trading along the Northern Silk Road, and now forms a node in China's Belt and Road Initiative, despite its harsh arid climate and sandstorm afflictions. The region's farmers cultivate the land despite drought, while efforts to thwart two encroaching deserts include China's largest desert reservoir (Zee 2021). Afforestation efforts, primarily sand control forestry, enlist diverse local groups, from government bureaus to citizen activists, aligning with corporate giants like Tencent and Alibaba (Bruckermann 2024). Locals use various methods to stabilise dunes, planting drought-resistant flora in hopes of curbing desertification (Zee 2021). When meeting women on afforestation work teams, they rarely dwelled on the gruelling conditions. Instead, they drew attention to the vibrant sociality of their teams, which they were keen to display on the internet through videos and clips, including with the tree-planting foreigner. Some also traced an explicit Maoist legacy for their labour.

Many women proudly shared their family history of fighting the desert or traced their feminist legacy back to the Iron Girls (Tie Guniang) of high socialism. These were all-female labour gangs whose revolutionary contributions to building socialism garnered great admiration for their capacity to shoulder heavy burdens and foster national modernisation (see Zhang and Liu 2015), dynamics also commemorated by songs and plaques in a regional Antidesertification Museum. Like Ant Forest promotional videos, they celebrated aspects of their work, especially lunch breaks with local produce, dancing routines in the dunes and recreational pursuits like make-up and clothing, in their posts. The women themselves tied their work to heroic sacrifices and feats of endurance already praised by the Maoist state, and they themselves posted videos in TikTok and messages in WeChat scrolls to celebrate their work in the dunes.

For instance, Leila, a woman in her mid-forties, found both joy and playfulness in her green work for a local afforestation project. Unlike her husband's transient labour as a construction worker in nearby Wuwei City, she sporadically worked in afforestation drives in the small village where they married. With two children and no extended family nearby, she appreciated the convenience of this way to earn an income, but also found fulfilment in transforming the land. She enjoyed the camaraderie of working as a team, sharing meals and practising dance routines that the workers performed for other villagers in the alleys after returning home in the evening. She found these activities added much-needed levity to the serious and strenuous endeavour of ‘controlling the sand’ (zhisha) through planting shrubs.

Like urban counterparts who treated the dunes as backdrops for photographs of leisure and adventure, Leila also shared their beauty through posting pictures, videos and storylines she created on social media. In fact, she shared her aesthetic appreciation for their green work with Ant Forest app users and their corporate PR imagery, admitting that ‘playing in the desert just looks really good (haokan)’ (see also Bruckermann 2024).

In Ant Forest's promotional materials, rural green producers stood in as avatars to the virtual tree planting of app users, with work teams often represented as happy peasant women, or as impoverished rural citizens in need of development by digital capital. While these mediated representations may seem a far cry from the actual lived realities of afforestation workers, Leila's reflections show that green workers mirrored the virtual, as-if qualities of aspirations for a green future in the countryside.

The final ethnographic section explores the ethical ambivalence expressed by Ant Forest users about the digital mediation of environmental consciousness and the enactment of ecological transformation through the app.

Banking on Green Trust

From a humble childhood growing up in a hospital compound in Hubei Province, Baozhai, a PhD student in economics at a top-tier Beijing university, appreciated the sense of security and mutual assistance that pervaded Chinese ‘big courtyard culture’ (dajiayuan wenhua) of the past. She felt this had been lost in modern gated neighbourhoods and anonymous cities. Despite her reservations about city life, when we discussed Alipay in her university dormitory in 2018, she was navigating various urban scoring systems to decide which job offers might eventually secure her urban residency via local household registration and access to real estate. When she ordered our lunch with a food delivery function on the app, Baozhai chose to forgo disposable chopsticks, joking about the resulting ‘energy points’ credited to her Ant Forest account with the sly comment that ‘every gram counts’.

As a researcher on rural household finance, Baozhai highlighted the value of mobile phone platforms like Alipay in providing micro-credit to rural citizens. Despite the opportunities fintech platforms offered users for risk management and asset accumulation, Baozhai expressed apprehensions about the extensive data collection involved, including for green purposes, noting that ‘it all goes through data now, they know more about you and your financial details and history than you do!’ However, those working in the ‘informal’ economy could build up a financial history through online transactions, earning credit scores that secured small loans and bypassed the need for collateral in conventional banks or dealing with predatory loan sharks. She summarised Alipay's approach to rural loans: ‘They trust small, and build big. This is why they have the word “ant” in the title.’ Yet Baozhai was sceptical of substantial rural transformation and green development occurring without equal access to education, a path that had fuelled her upward social mobility.

Baozhai saw Ant Forest as an educational tool that drew awareness towards the carbon footprint of various activities, yet she rarely changed her behaviour significantly as a result. She admitted: ‘The most consistent change I've made is using [the bike sharing app] Mobike rather than [the competing company] Ofo, so I get points for cycling!’ Baozhai was not alone in debating whether the app was truly leading to a reduction in carbon emissions or merely educating users about them.

Another Beijing student argued that the local government's restriction on car use by license plate number, a classic command-and-control measure, was more effective at combating pollution than the app's soft incentives. She contemplated: ‘Is knowing about carbon emissions just as good as actually cutting down on them? There are just as many cars on the road, no matter what game I play.’

Ambivalence about Ant Forest's effectiveness and real impact was a recurring theme as users considered the tangible outcomes of their digital actions. In general, users expressed a sense of resignation about online activities being time-consuming but found solace in the notion that, unlike other apps where the motivations were purely monetary, this app might be contributing to environmental sustainability. A primary school teacher in Shanxi Province captured this sentiment, as she used various apps to track the movement of stock prices throughout the day, although she acknowledged that many of her phone activities were a ‘waste of time’. Nonetheless, she felt that ‘with Ant Forest, I feel like I am helping the environment’, breaking out into a grin as she added ‘possibly’.

Users often noted that these apps were not only about ‘doing good’ (zuo gongyi) but also involved a profit motive, of ‘doing business’ (zuo shengyi) and ‘seeking profit’ (yingli). Tingting, who was an employee of a carbon footprint company, even described a potential rise in consumption resulting from such apps, as their simplified carbon measures relieved users of any moral deliberation over the environmental consequences of their actions. Moreover, many users commented on how clearly Ant Forest was designed to hook users, adding emotional and social incentives to environmentally minded transactions. Describing them as ‘highly addictive’, some users also raised Chinese cultural tropes of a tendency towards socialising through games, and even gambling.

These individual forms of ‘accumulating merit’ in online games also invite comparisons with ideals of self-improvement through exemplary moral behaviour in classic Confucianism (McDonald 2016) as well as the subjection of personhood to the differential acquisition of ‘human quality’ (suzhi) in contemporary China (Anagnost 2004; Kipnis 2007). Nonetheless, the playful rivalry and cooperative spirit also led users to toss about terms like ‘stupid games’ with affection, and sometimes embarrassment. Moreover, their commitment to caring for their digital tree nurseries sometimes surprised the users themselves. Nianzhen, one of the most diligent virtual foresters, whose daily habit of caring for her digital trees was described above, was certainly not alone in taking pride and pleasure in her pixelated seedlings and the actual trees planted in the Gobi.

Conclusion

The dissemination of state goals has undergone a profound shift in China, from analogue public announcements through billboards and loudspeakers to high-tech digitalised distribution, including green screens that are mounted on vehicles and integrated on mobile phones. Despite its neosocialist trajectory, this evolution is reminiscent of neoliberal developments elsewhere.

First, by embedding claims of morality within technical, bureaucratic and legal forms, hegemonic state projects increasingly rely on technomoral governance; second, by merging corporate interests and state power, these projects harness the hopes, dreams and fears of individuals to create docile subjects, evident not only in initiatives to promote consumer loyalty, but also ethically motivated behaviour, such as environmental responsibility.

In the formally communist People's Republic of China, these developments chime with Chinese citizens’ aspirations for a more sustainable future, as citizens seek environmental redemption and respite through green screens. Beyond neoliberalism, the Communist Party fuels these aspirations for environmental restitution through integrating green efforts into claims of morality embedded in neosocialist citizenship, driven by specific digital infrastructures of technomoral coding.

Within emerging digital infrastructures, citizens no longer appear simply as individualised and aggregated data points, but contribute to new forms of societal self- regulation. This reflects an adaptation of Foucault's notion of the subject, which once rested on biopower, an advancement from absolute power over life and death to the nuanced management of life processes, including via statistical optimisation. In the emerging digital era, power not only realises itself in the subject through embodiment, but through automation.

Concretely, in Alipay's Ant Forest green credits incentivise users to adopt moral – here ecological – choices by engaging with a digital infrastructure that is both adaptive and generative. This can be interpreted as an attempt to automate morality by replacing human ethical reasoning with algorithmic systems, within an app of ‘virtual nature’. From wandering through a digital carbon forest to hailing a consumer-citizen as a green neosocialist subject, fieldwork among Ant Forest users revealed diverse, sometimes disjointed, responses to the automation of green morality.

These mixed responses mirrored the contested nature of moral imperatives and approaches to environmental transition, whether driven by the state, corporations, public contributions or individual actions. In Shanxi, a province transitioning from coal, app users hoped for a greener future while grappling with paradoxes like the outsourcing of environmental stewardship to distant sites and generational divides in environmental care. Sandan, for instance, contemplated the irony of promoting digital environmentalism in far-flung locals while confronting tangible environmental decline at her doorstep.

Meanwhile, Alipay's Ant Forest initiative unequivocally celebrates its own environmental contributions. Moreover, it aligns efforts for financial inclusion with ecological progress by praising the resilience of afforestation workers, while invoking their need for economic development. On the ground, women like Leilei evoked a different narrative. They found the environmental impact of their work meaningful, but were even more fulfilled by its vibrant sociality, both in person and online. Moreover, the aesthetics of empowerment they drew on transcended the conventions of neoliberal capitalism, drawing instead on a legacy of feminist socialism and familial commitments. These efforts complied with the ‘economy of appearances’ (Tsing 2000) that green projects often demand.

Despite their daily visits to the app, Ant Forest users expressed doubt about the promises of these digital infrastructures to foster inclusion, and push forward green development. Instead, they satirised their own activities, and addiction, to their pixilated projects of environmental redemption. Baozhai, who was navigating various government scoring systems, personified this paradox: she embraced the convenience of digital platforms and their neosocialist goals of equitable progress, but remained apprehensive of being subjected to their abstract, impersonal and quantified logics.

As the nuanced interplay between state and citizen has evolved from overt campaigns to a subtle modulation of behaviours through a gamified digital infrastructure in China, promises of neosocialist ecological redemption have taken centre stage on platforms designed to ‘automate morality’. However, this digital mediation risks displacing deeper ethical engagement with the environmental impacts of activities, limiting ecological choices to individual sustainability, while deflecting responsibilities from the state and corporations. Therefore, there is a pressing need to move beyond the allure of green screens that offer a partial, superficial confrontation with ecological degradation. Rather than relying on gamified incentives and algorithmic proxies, tackling environmental crises and building a sustainable future demand ethical engagement that grapples with the complexities and contradictions of moral decision-making.