Eleven Phones, One Runner: The Campus Side Hustle That Broke a Rule
At a Chinese university, someone noticed an unusual sight on the campus running track: a single student moving along with eleven smartphones strapped to his body. Each phone belonged to a classmate who had paid him to complete a required running assignment on their behalf. The arrangement, known in Chinese as daipao — literally, running on someone else’s behalf — is a small underground economy on campuses where fitness apps log distance and pace for physical education credits.
The scheme collapsed when the university found out. Officials pressed the runner to hand over the list of students whose phones he had carried, which would have allowed the school to discipline each of them. He refused. Accounts of the episode circulated widely on Chinese social media, where the student was praised for what many described as a sense of honor, or renyi — the Confucian-inflected idea of loyalty to one’s peers.
For global readers, the story is a window into a very Chinese campus ritual. Many universities require students to log a set number of running kilometres each term, often through a mobile app that tracks GPS, speed and timing. The rules exist to counter sedentary habits and to make physical education measurable. But they also create a market: students who dislike running, or who are busy with coursework and job hunting, are willing to pay for someone else to do it.
The runner’s business model was crude but efficient. Eleven phones at once meant eleven separate accounts, each logging a route. A single lap could satisfy nearly a dozen assignments. What the school saw as fraud, the runner appears to have seen as a service — and his customers presumably agreed.
The refusal to name names is what turned a minor disciplinary matter into a broader conversation. Chinese social media users debated whether he was foolish or admirable, and whether a rule that can be outsourced so easily is really measuring fitness at all. Some commenters argued that the universities should fix the incentives rather than punish the runner. Others noted that the students who paid him faced no public consequences, at least in the version of events that circulated online.
The episode also touches a nerve about surveillance and data on Chinese campuses. Fitness apps that track location and pace are common, and students have long traded tips on how to satisfy them without actually running. The eleven-phone runner simply scaled up a practice that many knew about.
It is not clear what disciplinary action, if any, the university ultimately took. The runner’s name and school were not widely reported, and the story spread mainly through screenshots and forum posts. But the image of a student jogging with a fan of phones taped to his chest has stuck, part comedy and part parable about rules that everyone knows are being gamed.