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I visited Shanghai last fall, what now seems like eons ago. What struck me was just how different the city I experienced as a child had really become. The province that my grandparents lived in, before, containing only a few-story mom and pop stores and restaurants, now also housed a multi-story shopping outlet. The street that I frequented to preschool had familiar stalls selling a typical breakfast of 油条[Chinese doughnuts] and 豆浆[soy milk], but they refused to accept cash, holding out instead scanners for your smartphone. Even small restaurants would offer takeout paired with local delivery services, arriving on your doorstep with soup dumplings still steaming hot. Looking back at those times now, in hindsight, it’s apparent just how technological advances have prepared China for the social distancing to come.
China’s tremendous amounts of human capital have greatly simplified labor intensive tasks in this age of cheap labor platforms like Uber and Doordash. Similar services like Didi and 饿了么[Hungry yet?] respectively offer the same types of transportation and delivery. However, even non-perishable deliveries like electronics can often take as little as a few hours thanks to the population density in the large cities. As these services improved, they’ve tended to hit a tipping point in scale. Instead of having to make individual deliveries, a…
