Both QQ and WeChat are far more than an email replacement, however. QQ, for instance, offers a profile page (in the Qzone), complete with a personalised animated introduction sequence, along with a timeline and diary to share your ta de dongtai (‘happenings’). It can also be used to access an extensive gaming network to access international games like World of Warcraft as well as home-grown games like Dream of Three Kingdoms.

If QQ is a supercharged Facebook, WeChat is something like WhatsApp on steroids. McDonald demonstrates the Drift Bottle function, for instance, which lets you record a short message and throw it into a virtual ocean, where it will be retrieved by a random user at a later point. WeChat will also let you view and chat to people nearby – “So it is more like Grindr or Tinder or whatever” – and if you are feeling lonely, you can also vigorously shake your phone – which again, makes you visible to strangers across the whole network who may also feel like a chat. It proved to be popular for university students, for instance, who used the ‘Shake’ function to make friends. (Currently, WeChat has more than 700 million users worldwide, most of whom are in China.)

One of the core differences, from British social media use, was the fact that the people of Anshan tended to shy away from political pronouncements on their profile pages – “not because of censorship, but just because all the people around them would ask why are you posting that on here,” says McDonald. Instead, their updates tended to be centred on the family and relationships with somewhat saccharine images and messages – perhaps as a way of upholding some of the values at the heart of their rural community.