【推荐3】Spring Festival is a special occasion for children also because they receive red envelopes (hongbao) from elders on the occasion. While in the past, children used to rejoice after receiving hongbao from elders in person, nowadays they mostly receive them online thanks to the coming of mobile payment apps such as Alipay and WeChat, which urged the central bank to create a new legal tender (法定货币) for online transactions (交易).

That’s how the digital renminbi came into being. The digital currency has increased the types of negotiable instruments issued by the central bank and diversified the payment tools. Yet the promotion and application of the digital renminbi faces some challenges, especially because it is yet to be recognized nationwide.

First, thanks to Alipay and WeChat, they account for almost 95 percent of the mobile payment market. Based on these payment apps, a complete consumer application ecosystem has been established covering activities such as shopping, traveling, giving red envelopes, making payments, and investing funds. In the short term, however, the “digital renminbi wallet” can hardly shake the existing payment and transaction ecosystem.

Second, payments made through the digital renminbi are not channeled through bank accounts. Instead, they are deposited directly into “digital accounts” and transactions can be completed through an electronic device, which may cause users to worry about the security of their deposits, particularly because if a user loses his or her cell phone, he/she could lose a lot of money.

Third, the digital renminbi may be a substitute for cash, but the public is not attracted to it because it has no appreciation value. While people can earn interest on bank deposits, no interest is offered on digital renminbi deposits.

In fact, the original design of the digital renminbi was for retail —to make transactions more convenient for consumers and merchants. The central bank, too, has said all the research and development is to ensure the digital currency replaces cash, which shows its aim is to use it for retail, especially to make life more convenient for the public with the help of the Internet and mobile apps.

【推荐1】My name is Stella Young. I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing. I went to school; I hung out with my friends; I fought with my younger sisters. It was all very normal. And when I was 15, a member of my local community approached my parents and wanted to submit my name for a community achievement award. My parents said, “Hmm, that’s really nice, but there’s kind of one obvious problem with that. She hasn’t actually achieved anything.” And they were right. You know I went to school, I got good marks, and I had a very low-key after-school job in my mum’s hairdressing salon.

Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year-11 Legal Studies class when a boy put up his hand and said, “Hey Miss, when are you going to start your speech?”

And I said, “What speech?”

And he said, “You know, like, your motivational speaking. You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff. It’s usually in the big hall.”

And that was the moment I realized that this kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration.

For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors. We’re not real people. We are there to inspire. Yeah, we’ve been sold the lie that disability is a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional.

It’s not a bad thing, and it doesn’t make you exceptional. And in the past few years, we’ve been able to spread this lie even further through social media.

Life as a disabled person is actually somewhat difficult. We do overcome some things. But they have nothing to do with our bodies. I use the term “disabled people” purposely, because I subscribe to what’s called the social model of disability. This model tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses（诊断）.

I want to live in a world where we don’t have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. I want to live in a world where we value disabled people’s real achievement. And I want to live in a world where a year-11 kid in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user.

【推荐2】Like a lot of science fiction fans, I read William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer not long after it came out in 1984 and, for decades, I had been wondering how he was able to imagine the future when the technologies he wrote about had barely been invented, until I eventually had an opportunity to interview him in the fall of 2020.

During the interview, I asked how he could see the future of the Internet in 1984, when no one other than a few geeks (极客) had heard of it and whether he had been to scientific talks.

“I have never read or listened to the tech leaders’ talks about new technologies,” he replied. “I would rather sit in a room full of either artists or criminals. Their talks would be more helpful with my writing.”

As a journalist who has reported on Silicon Valley (硅谷) for 15 years, I found his comment really convincing. I’ve sat through press conferences and interviews with many famous tech leaders—Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Marissa Mayer and many others. I never heard Zuckerberg predict fake (假的) news or Steve Jobs worry about iPhone addiction.

“These men are driven by an ideal of how much their technology will change people’s lives or by promises of a lot of money, or both. But one thing is clear: They usually avoid talking about what might happen when their inventions hit the real world,” Gibson explained. “On the other hand, artists are more about holding a mirror up to society and showing us how we behave with the new tools we are given, while criminals are in effect businessmen without brakes, who will look at whatever the latest technology is and think what they can do with it. Neither of them is bound by social conventions at all.”

Since the interview, I have decided to take a page out of William Gibson’s playbook and will go and find some artists or criminals and see what they are going to do with any new technology as soon as it appears in the news.