“New Nomads” in Uncertain Numbers: On Contemporary Nomads under China’s National Conditions

You may have heard of the concept of “digital nomad,” which is a way of life that involves working remotely without being in a fixed city. This term has gradually attracted the attention of mainstream people in the past two years due to the epidemic and the unemployment wave. Many media, academic and private institutions have conducted research on "digital nomads".

As a result, we often find that true “digital nomads” only account for a small part of the field survey respondents in China. This shows that this concept has been generally used in China and has been used to a wider range of people, including but not limited to: true digital nomads, transformation explorers, new lifestyle practitioners, social innovators, spacers Young people, etc. What they have in common is that they do not believe that people should stay in one place (even if they can have a base), just like Captain Nemo and his Nautilus.

This article discusses this type of group of people, which I hereby call “ new homeless people .”

Before using a new word to summarize this group of people, we have to use the term "digital nomad" that has been used overseas for more than ten years to discuss related phenomena, search for information, and get to know the community. It is combined with China's current special national conditions: the maturity of transportation infrastructure, the epidemic unemployment wave, and the emergence of new occupations ; and it clearly shows age characteristics, making it connected with many domestic youth communities, social innovation and other new job explorers When I get up, I am obviously more concerned about discussing social issues and exploring new paths .

In fact, many people, such as writers, artists, and self-media bloggers, could have lived and worked in another place. Only when the mainstream consensus believes that people have a registered permanent residence, and businesses must grow based on a certain place, and therefore mobile people are as helpless as duckweeds, propertyless, unstable, and difficult to manage, will they become "nomads" A group of people who are considered disadvantaged. (The household registration system, which has been implemented for thousands of years, is like the green card for local residents. Their rights and obligations in social security, housing purchase, education, etc. are restricted to residents without local household registration, even if they are also Chinese).

Today, the "new homeless" are obviously not a destabilizing factor in society. We have received basic education, we have gained knowledge everywhere, and we are more capable of social innovation. We swim, just like traditional nomads, "following water and grass" because we seek an environment and resources that are more conducive to our own development . There are cyclical nomads and there are uncertain ones. New cultural forms emerging across the country, such as various exhibitions, cultural activities, residency programs, and participation in hackerhouse/creator houses, all require the migration of people. Through nomadism, you can come into contact with people, things, and concepts (such as "blue organizations") that you cannot come into contact with elsewhere. These new things are constantly updating personal thinking and group thinking.

If we want to generalize a bit, from Beipiao, Shanghai Piao, Shenzhen Piao, to Hangzhou Piao, Rongpiao, Jingpiao... and even from various towns and cities to surrounding or provincial capital cities to study and work, and return to their hometown from time to time, or because of People who migrate due to job transfers are of course also in a nomadic state, and they are also contemporary nomads. "Single Reading 08" writes: "We live in a highly mobile era, and everyone has become a conscious or forced wanderer. During the wandering, we not only gain liberation and new feelings, but also become frivolous and weightless. ." This is what the one-way space's special bookshelf "Nowhere" is about.

There is also an article in Culture Zongheng that discusses the story of a doctor from Shandong who experienced repeated migrations from his hometown to Beijing to his hometown to Beijing. It reflects that Chinese youth in the new era are caught between the logic of acquaintances with rural society and the logic of modern cities. dilemma in time. The number of this type of people is much larger, and they may even be "mainstream" in a certain sense (words such as "You are young, can't you think of going back to the village?" illustrate this point).

The difference between this group of people and the "new nomads" is that the former regard "stable working life" as the norm and are in different geographical locations and working conditions at different stages. However, once they leave a certain normality, they are like frogs leaving. Familiar waters are in uncertainty, and it is necessary to connect to the normalcy of the next section of water as soon as possible.

For the "new nomads", constantly acquiring new information and inspiration on the road and in nomadism is the engine of work. Individuals traveling on the road also need to have strong self-awareness, self-understanding, self-discipline and practical methodology . Many of them are full of ideas, execution, passion and courage. It can even be said that they have a strong sense of social responsibility.

Characteristics of new homeless people

Compared with "digital nomads" in the strict sense, which have the characteristics of "remote work to obtain stable income" and "geographic arbitrage" , the new nomads under China's national conditions do not have these two characteristics. Because I am trying, I may not necessarily have a stable income ; because the transfer of places requires energy and cost to adapt, places that can be "arbitrated" in the country often have other shortcomings (infrastructure, resources, etc.), and "geographic arbitrage" is not a A situation where normalcy is established . The scenario of traveling overseas is beyond the scope of this article.

So, what are the main characteristics of the new homeless people with Chinese characteristics? In my opinion, there are the following points:

1. They pursue new production and lifestyles to respond to current problems and challenges.

As mentioned above, the new nomads include a diverse group of people, overlapping with various circles of transition explorers, new lifestyle practitioners, social innovators, and youth culture . For example, I came into contact with: people who make art books, game designers, humanities writers, people who make social practice art, rural innovation, ecological co-construction, public space, community creation, life aesthetics, and cultural and museum circles. , innovative education, AI, technology development...of course there are also people in various traditional industries.

My guide to the age of 2025 and The Home Project’s recently released Community is a continuing engagement with an actual trend – New Nomadism – teases out specific community themes more carefully and is well worth a read.

2. Be “social” and tend to move to places with cultural creativity and community.

Unlike pure digital nomads, their requirements are generally good infrastructure, climate, and prices. When a new homeless person comes to a place, the reason is that there is vitality there and there are interesting people and things happening there .

This is consistent with the first feature mentioned earlier, following the new way of life and production, because everyone needs to collide with ideas and inspiration. This part comes from online communities, and the field of offline communities undoubtedly provides more possibilities for deeper communication. (Online and offline communities are increasingly transforming into each other)

The community here does not mean to stick together for warmth and follow a recognized plan. It is more of a place for communication and discussion. For example, the purpose of the NCC community is to "create an environment suitable for co-living, connect many participants with similar values, and gradually form a community with a strong co-creation atmosphere, thereby helping more people explore interesting and useful things that suit themselves." A value-based work and lifestyle.” In my observation, I think NCC is really working hard in this direction on values ​​and achieving this on some levels.

In each community, you have the opportunity to meet all kinds of people, those who have fresh ideas, those who are working on their own projects, those who are looking for people to launch projects, etc. In fact, it is the vitality of society, people with ideas and creativity.

There are also valuable articles forwarded in group chats, which greatly expands a person's original information channels. These enable people in diverse communities to always be in a state of input and output of new ideas, and to consciously integrate these thoughts into their work/practice/creation .

During the communication process, a person will gain new ideas for new projects and may also find potential target groups and partners. There will also be "Although I'm not interested in what you do, I know a friend who can introduce you to me." Once the connection is established, new projects are initiated and advanced together. (My main creative card game "Era Slice" is a product born in the community.)

At least for me, this set of [information acquisition - finding partners with similar visions to cooperate - output - verification in the community - to attract more exchanges with interested people - iterative methods 】 The flow can be run through. For every individual homeless person in the community, he or she can get some help and feedback from the community. As for whether it can be transformed into a part of one's own production and life, it depends on the individual.

Another point to add is that the community can better understand and tap the value of individuals, and help individuals better position themselves. Because everyone in the nomadic state is meeting and discovering new people, looking for their potential companions and projects. In the process of introducing oneself to the outside world and communicating with specific people, a person's positioning of himself becomes clearer and more complete, and he can even notice characteristics and skills that he had not noticed before.

New Nomads and related communities can provide the above environment, mainly because unlike the logic of commercial capital operation, the logic of communities relies more on people's true evaluation of the value of what you do.

Therefore, there is a natural connection between neo-nomads and community/consensual community . This relationship is actually most obvious in the trajectory of the growth of homeless individuals and communities. I may write an article "From Consensus Community to Co-creation Community" to demonstrate this.

3. Their lives are passively contrasted with the mainstream domestic practices . Under constant questioning and judgment from the outside world, such as "What are you doing?" and "Are you rich?" they have to compare their choices with the so-called "normal path" (if there is such a thing). words!), you need to constantly examine your own life and provide evidence to explain your various practices, the reasons behind them, how to implement them, etc., to prove their rationality and "legitimacy".

Here are two passages from scholar Yuan Changgeng:

"The rapid development of the past 40 years has brought about a by-product. That is, no matter which social class you are in or what your living background is, we all share a set of life logic to a large extent. Rich or poor Whether you are a city person or a rural person, although your expectations for your future are different, you always have expectations: a person should work hard, leave a certain amount of savings for future generations, or let others Your descendants will achieve a class jump. This is the biggest common denominator that the rapid development of the past 40 years has left us on a psychological level. We have almost unconditionally accepted this logic of life."

"But from another perspective, in terms of the diversity of life logic and life philosophy, this is a relatively single logic. This creates a problem. If you happen to be born in this era, then when you grow up , the impact you receive, the many things you see, all of this will make you feel - as if only living such a life is normal and the only normal way out in the world."

More than one billion people have so unconditionally accepted the same value evaluation system that we think life should be like this and cannot imagine what else it could be like . (Our philosophy has not created a culture that gives everyone motivation to move forward, and it has not created enough meaning and value for life.) In the field of this large environment, anything that is new and culturally creative has a The invisible ceiling and the pressure of reality press there. Faced with the questioning of mainstream values, few can escape completely and self-consistently, so they have to shrink all the time. (At the same time, the values ​​behind popular passwords in big cities are becoming increasingly thin, and the spiritual life in most cities is boring and lacking.)

When all those outside the mainstream are squeezed into the categories of "non-mainstream", "just interested", and "waiting to return to the right path", everyone has no choice but to join a group to keep warm. This is why, as mentioned earlier, the culture of new vagrants comes together with various social designs, social innovations, and avant-garde culture (art, sustainability, community building, public welfare, etc.).

Is it possible that [not living in a fixed place] is a natural thing (especially for nomads and sea peoples), at least it is a possible way of life - but the convergence with the mainstream makes Some of them have to pretend that they are fixed somewhere to reduce the mental cost of explanation.

If you don't feel this pull, it means that you are highly self-consistent, have gained recognition from some people, and can reasonably explain it to the people around you, surpassing the state that most people are in.

The above three characteristics are my own summary, which may be quite different from the mainstream media’s perspective on new homeless people. When doing some interviews, I feel a sense of discomfort caused by the given framing of questions. In fact, each new homeless person has his own set of narrative logic. Therefore, when accepting such interviews, he needs to translate it into a language logic acceptable to the public. However, he does not fully express what he really wants to express. In the end, when the content is presented, it is often It feels like the real ideas have been distorted, and the narrative is incomplete and only presents content from the media’s perspective, which is quite boring. (Unless you are working in self-media and can bring a certain amount of traffic, I personally am not willing to accept unpaid interviews)

To sum up, what I want to show is that the "digital nomads" in the Chinese environment, that is, the "new nomads" mentioned in this article, include [the pursuit of new production and lifestyle] and [the tendency to move to places with cultural creativity and place of community] and [passively in contrast to mainstream practices] . In my opinion, new vagrants who have passed the transitional stage and successfully found their own identity and a productive lifestyle often have a certain spirit of independence and innovation, pursue their own value at work, and are willing to invest in things that they truly love and are worth paying for. energy. (If you want to go a little further, it has the greatest potential to transition into a "super individual in the AI ​​era")

Therefore, if you have ever seen a post like "Experience a digital nomad for a month", you will find that many people regard nomadism as a state similar to career exploration (rather than a productive lifestyle + identity), or as a Attracting attention. What a person experiences during the true nomadic process, ranging from how to save money to buy air tickets, to how to quickly adapt to a new environment and new culture (such as the impact of the environment on the rhythm of work), there are too many things that are involved in the transformation of space. The skill growth points to be mastered are far more than those written by the self-media. (Here I recommend this article by yeye, a veteran digital nomad for ten years. It is the most accurate account of all aspects of life and mentality of a mature nomad I have ever seen)

In fact, real new nomads know very well that this is by no means a way suitable for most people. It at least requires an individual to clearly know what he can do and what he wants to do. This requires strong self-awareness and self-understanding. , self-discipline, motivation and practical methodologies . At least, you have to be self-consistent. Otherwise, you will be confused and wavering all the time, not knowing what you can do. Basically, you have not passed the transition stage. After experiencing it, you will choose to return to the original path. To put it bluntly, I have forgotten what a friend said, "If you are a piece of trash in the workplace, don't expect anything to change by becoming a digital nomad." For most people, a stable path is more suitable for them . There is no right or wrong, just individual differences.

Basic living needs of new homeless people

The needs of new homeless people are obviously different from those of ordinary tourists.

China originally had a culture of "travel friends" in the tourism circle, which was relatively niche and not fully connected with the new way of life and production. The current wave of nomad is a lifestyle that combines work, life, social interaction, and hobbies in an all-round way. For creative workers and remote workers, it is not necessary to be fixed in one place; it is unified nationwide. The convenient transportation system has gradually matured in recent years, which has also promoted nomadism. (Imagine that every time you go to a province, you have to learn how to operate familiar high-speed rail, takeaway, rental and other services. The energy cost of traveling will definitely be much higher. This is also a challenge we face when going abroad)

But overall, the original tourist facilities were not suitable for living . The cost of living, in theory, is the cost of daily living , which is much lower than the cost of traveling. You need to go to a place and pay for food and accommodation at local prices. So what I want to live in is not a hotel, but an apartment with a kitchen and a washing machine; what I eat every day is not a restaurant, but a combination of small restaurants + takeaway + homemade food. There is also various local information, such as renting a battery car, where to buy daily necessities, where to make money, etc.

Information in this area, as well as real "travel guides" for all parts of the country, are still lacking.

For new homeless people, relatively basic living facilities include:

• Accommodation - most importantly, it is best to have a kitchen, washing machine, and work desk

• Food - If you are not in a familiar urban system, or even in a foreign country, efficient ways to obtain food every day require a certain amount of energy to find and adapt.

• Life services - such as battery car rental, luggage storage, express delivery, supermarket, etc.

• Items that are useful when traveling - such as clothing compression bags, power bank multi-socket converter in one, small scissors that can be brought on the plane and high-speed rail (shh), etc.

• Office environment - This is a very important requirement for digital nomads. Like accommodation, it determines whether they will stay in one place for a long time. At least one person must be able to form a schedule here. But in fact, we found that even in a "new homeless city" like Dali, there is actually very little office demand! The Dalihub shared office space around the ancient city has been open for so long that it is empty most of the time (when people from above came to inspect it, they even pulled people over to pretend to work). Although you can say that other spaces such as cafes carry some of the office needs, but when you go to a place like Chiang Mai, where there are already quite a few cafes to choose from, and the shared office spaces are already very full, you will know that Among the people in Dali, there are actually more new nomads + residents + tourists, rather than digital nomads with office needs.

Regardless of spiritual and cultural needs, it is quite important whether the above can form a daily schedule after a short period of adaptation. Especially the place of residence is discussed separately.

Where do new homeless people live?

What factors determine where new nomads will go next?

If you don’t consider that I am just a sojourner, I have traveled through all the provinces and cities in the country, and there are still many places that left a deep impression on me (you can read the roaming articles I wrote).

The situation for long-term residence is different. Although it seems that there are many choices in the 9.6 million square kilometers of land, there are very few that can meet the needs of new homeless people. Most places are not ready to accept new homeless people , and only a few places have the infrastructure and cultural atmosphere to accept the immigrant population. In other places, it is often difficult to take into account the three important factors of cultural vitality, convenient transportation, and low prices and few people. As a result, cities like Dali have become the first choice for almost all new nomads , creating a Matthew effect. Other cities are far from being truly suitable for new nomads. If we start from the local area, there are many posts on Xiaohongshu when searching for the keyword livable city, so I won’t discuss them here.

It would be much better if we did not consider "place" but considered it from the perspective of space or stronghold. In the past two years, various communities have been established, providing new homeless people with certain enclave options. The more of this, the better. The types of strongholds will also vary according to more segmented needs:

1) Go to a city for an event, stay for a few days, and visit local institutions and communities

2) I want to stay in one place for a long time and interact with the local area. Usually in a small town, I often have to spend two days first to find a long-term rental.

3) If you want to be quiet for a while and reduce social interaction, you can go to Xincun Village

4) You need to move from point A to point B and stay in a city along the high-speed rail for a few days.

The short-term needs of one month to several months are the most difficult to meet (if you are not willing to stay in hotels and youth hostels). Many inns in Dali have begun to offer monthly or half-monthly rents, but most places in China can only rent annually, or at most half a year.

Basically it depends on where you know where to live. In fact, many times we decide to live in a place just because of this. A typical example is the DNA Digital Nomad Commune - without DNA and later DN Yucun, I don’t think anyone would go to Anji to become a digital nomad. This kind of community was very rare before DNA. A group of them have only appeared in the past two years. Some are serious, some want to make a profit, some are making big investments, and some are doing their own renovation or crowdfunding to find friends to do it together. All added up, it's still very few, relying on word of mouth.

In this process, the nomad base has been combined with other practices, such as rural innovative natural construction, art residency, co-living experiments, etc. Now that we all live here, other parts of life can naturally become interesting.

To sum up, the requirements for shelter are as follows, with increasing difficulty:

1. First of all, you need to know which cities have non-hotel options to stay in . It usually takes a few days to a few months, and there is a public reservation entrance. For a person who is not in the city and has not seen the house in person, this information, from the hardware to the trust of acquaintances and community attributes, is very important information. It will be very cumbersome to find it by yourself, although there is a lot of it on WeChat. In groups and private relationships, a public and aggregation platform is needed (of course there are also the attendant problems of the "friends of friends of friends" chain of trust).

2. Live together with other similar partners and have certain exchanges beyond basic life, such as exercising together, chatting, making appointments, etc.

3. In the community, you can create . For example, hacker houses in programmer communities, art residencies, etc.

There is a huge demand for residential facilities and related information collection that needs to be kept up. Currently, there are these channels:

• Directory of places to stay in various places compiled by Jiashan Gailiang (20 years old, many places in it are no longer there)

• Airbnb, its purpose is to allow people to use their spare houses for other people around the world to live in. It is exactly what we need, but it is a pity that it has withdrawn from the Chinese market.

• Scattered information from various city groups on Douban

• Some short- and medium-term projects, including roaming projects, ecological community practices, field surveys, hackerhouses and creator houses for developers and creators, etc.

• Some communities, including the 706 roaming network, encrypted homeless communities, etc., still need to improve their mechanisms.

what can we do? From the perspective of increasing bases , in fact, a large number of vacant houses can provide a place for homeless people to stay if they are slightly modified, such as the house in your hometown. Your hometown is a special existence to you, but to others it may be a longing for place where no one knows you, where it is affordable and comfortable.

I have a friend in Enshi, Hubei Province. She said that she was inspired to build Yunjian Valley after reading my book "Residence Destinations for Domestic Digital Nomads" and invited me to live there. The feeling of this connection is amazing.

It is better to build a community. However, building an offline community is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. It requires a lot of patience to deal with all kinds of people. Always be mentally prepared that it will be more difficult than you think. It would be much better to have your own base.

The other is to improve the support network for new nomads and wanderers , which in my opinion includes elements such as information sorting, consensus connection (such as alliances between communities), and social trust mechanisms. Especially as mentioned above, for individuals to open their own space for others to stay, work or communicate, it especially requires both parties to have a certain understanding of what the other person has done in what kind of place before and what ideas they hold ("My space does not want to Let the dogs and cats live here, but some interesting people are welcome”). Regarding this issue, I personally think that the best solution is the widely used social layer social badge, which can help people see what others are doing and thinking in a certified system, and use this as a basis to filter out target groups (from a wide range of of new homeless groups to a specific thematic consensus).

Why filter? Because different people have different spiritual and cultural needs.

The spiritual and cultural needs of new homeless people

As mentioned earlier, new homeless people tend to gravitate (more than average) to culturally vibrant places.

Think about the many new vagrants and sojourners in Dali. What are they doing when they are not working? As far as 23 years are concerned, most people came "to see what other people are doing." Many people are disgusted by these words.

If in a community or field, for example, most people have something they want to do and a small number of people "come and see what everyone is doing", that's pretty good. Everyone can form the discussion and exchange mentioned above. ecology. If most people want to see what others are doing - it's awkward, no one is doing anything. At this time, the bad money will drive out the good money, causing a small number of people who had the information to withdraw from the field.

Taking the local new homeless community in Dali as an example, the climax in the past few years may have occurred in: October to November 21 (706 Dali Youth Party), July to December 22 (Wacat Summer, CBI, DAO SPACE), From April to June 23 (NCC, Dali Home, Kaiyuan Home, WAMOLAB Office Space, Vector Space, Bird Place and other communities were launched), the new homeless community culture gradually took root in Dali like waves of fire. (Of course, there have been new immigrants in Dali since the last century, so I won’t go into details here. For details, see Youth Magazine’s Forty Years of New Immigrants in Dali: The Possibility of Continuing Community Life in Iteration and Regeneration ). In 2023, with the recovery of tourism, the popularity of Youfeng, and the influx of a large number of tourists and residents, the number of strawberries in the Nanmen wet market increased from 11 yuan to 15 yuan, gradually diluting local creativity. As the first Digital Nomad Conference was moved to Guangzhou and other places due to force majeure, many of the troublemakers in Dali were also moved.

The vagrants can originally travel, just like Lao Xuade did DNA (they hope to apply the methodology of Dali's acquaintance society to a wider range of villages), which is not bad. But whether a city can attract the people it wants really depends on the art of its managers (are tourists more important than long-term residents?). Because of China’s super large-scale effect, a place may quickly become popular due to a random incident, gentrification, and crowds of people come and go. It is difficult for the dispersed people and the atmosphere that has finally settled to grow in another soil. The most important thing is people.

Communities/spaces in various places may be more or less derived from the experience of the host somewhere in his life, and have become consensus communities on various themes. The consensus community needs to write another article. If you are interested, you can find the link at the end of the article. I made an inventory. The "habitable" label welcomes all kinds of new homeless people. (What is a "consensus community"? Teacher Tang Guanhua from the Home Project proposed this concept. I didn't find a better word, so I used this word. Later, when I met and talked with Teacher Guanhua, he was quite happy to use it like this, haha. )

Going a step further, let’s summarize the spiritual and cultural needs of new vagrants:

• Cultural vitality and social needs : There must be interesting things to attend

• The friendly atmosphere of a society of acquaintances : you can’t feel it when you are in it. You will only miss it when you go to a place without this atmosphere.

• Deep sense of belonging and emotional support : When everyone, things and even space are nomadic, new nomads will need a stable emotional support, which can be in the form of an online shared home. It is recommended to refer to the " Yeshan Dojo " community narrative initiated by Youyang

• The need for creation : communication and output activities that lead to new productivity. Especially after the initial adaptation stage, the creator's instinct is to make things happen and give value and meaning to life.

• Information sources for your own projects and content of interest : For example, "Where can I learn ceramics in Jingdezhen?" "Where are the most interesting ideas?" This kind of information. Jiji is a good platform, but many people feel that they need their own media platform that is more suitable for new nomads and creators (find Da Cao! She wants to do this)

So, what do you do to support your network? What are the habitable communities and bases across the country? How to find "spiritual corners" in various places? What is the co-creation community “creating”? What does the new cultural creativity we expect look like? …

Maybe next time, I can’t write anymore.

More reading

Community is the real trend that continues to emerge - New Nomadism

Domestic digital tourist destinations

National consensus community/space list: https://cyanlibra.notion.site/b69055f077ef4124925a639c48ebbdf4?v=f993b6bcb653471facdb9c43266512f4&pvs=4

【illustrate】

I am not specifically researching the topic of this article! I have not done any fieldwork specifically. What I think comes from my life, communication with my peers, etc., and perhaps it also has a simpler perspective.

I am an independent researcher who is "academic outside the academic circle". I use new paradigms to study the relationship between language, culture and cognition, and what kind of philosophy can bring about a response to postmodern bi'duan culture. I am also a creator, and I like to present meaningful ideas and concepts in works accessible to the public. As a contemporary nomad, I usually pay attention to cultural phenomena and the thinking behind them during my travels.

This article was first published on the personal public account @水光清线Cyanlibra