FriendOfDeSoto

I don’t think so, I have witnessed so.

You have inadvertently hit the nail on the head. They just call it socialism. There are several shades of poverty, for different reasons. One shade is due to the fact that a lot of services, like welfare, education, and medical, are only available to you in your hometown, probably the one you were born in. But if you have migrated from bf nowhere Gansu province to a big city where the jobs are, you rid yourself of that safety net. It’s hard/costly to change this hometown registration so most don’t and become quasi undocumented workers in their own country. And they are the ones who work insane hours in shitty and dangerous work conditions and it’s then who will look for anything to save a yuan.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to China. But even in the 2000s it was not uncommon to have to pay for toilet paper at a vending machine. Not at all public facilities but the more local you went, the fewer tourists would be there, the more this happens. So getting roll for watching an ad is an improvement.

And as the article points out, they cannot have nice things, i.e. free sandpaper toilet roll, because people will just steal it. I feel like this becomes exponentially less dystopian when you frame it as you can either have no paper at all or watch the ad/pay for it.

And there is another cultural difference. The Chinese are more like the Romans when it comes to these bodily functions. Much more willing to take care of it communally or at a hole in the ground surrounded by a thigh high “modesty” barrier. So asking an attendant for extra roll is something that the majority of Chinese would have less of a problem with, I think.

Is this happening even for their premium subscribers?