My country is caught between conservatism and avant-gardism. We are not content with the status quo; on the flipside, we are too provincial to accept radical changes. Therefore, novelties are almost always attended by the former’s wailing and the latter’s celebration.

Of late, Wuhan has been bombarded by 400 automated, self-controlled taxis: LuoBu, intended as a remote homophone of “robot.” This sort of taxi, devised by the corporate Baidu, has invited a spirited discussion among Wuhan citizens for its accidentally bumping into a fortyish woman, inhibiting the traffic during rush hours, and having no license plates. Before this, Baidu already gained notoriety when its online diagnosing service misdiagnosed patients as having cancer and pneumonia.

I thought that the advent of LuoBo would only add to its notoriety. Netizens proved me right: after a bit, LuoBo and Baidu were already severely denounced for stealing the jobs of cab drivers. In this regard, I couldn’t help relating LuoBo to another fabulous invention of modern China: precooked food.

Upon its advent, precooked food was deemed as a miraculous invention in the sense that it emancipated housewives (which comprised a considerable percentage of the population) from oily and sweltering kitchens. Cooking was as accessible as unwrapping the plastic box, putting it into a microwave, waiting for a while, and pouring the result- all but indistinguishable from homemade dishes- into a receptacle.

Unfortunately, precooked food did not develop as my optimistic compatriots expected. Restaurants pledged to their gullible customers their foods’ authenticity and drew glistening and palatable dishes on the menu while serving them precooked noodles, artificial meat and apocryphal vegetables cooked with gutter oil. As such, they could earn the same than if they used genuine meat and dough while cutting costs to a terribly low level. It was even a more lucrative endeavor than selling tobacco, seriously.

That is why I grew to identify more with the conservative population. It is not the actual inventions that the radical left-wing population on the internet extol. Rather, it is the flawless prototype they configured in their credulous minds. In practice, corporates will exploit profit in every conceivable way, to the extent that new inventions are almost always degraded into instrumental profit-earners.