Block Chain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang (FSG Originals X Logic)

“Famine has its own vocabulary, a hungry language that haunts and lingers,” Xiaowei Wang says, and a generous portion of China’s population had mastered that vocabulary, both before and after the birth of the People’s Republic. Seventy-one years later food is abundant but China’s food safety index is below that of Mexico or Turkey. “Feeding 22% of the world’s population on 7% of the world’s arable land is just plain difficult.” 

“Food safety is crucial for political stability,” a problem matched by the truth that 40% of China’s population (and 8% of the world’s population) lives in rural agrarian areas where farmers tend plots of land that are “smaller than two football fields.” Young people flock to the cities for better jobs, where their wages are eaten up by the higher cost of urban living. They replicate the conditions they came from in “urban villages,” pockets of squalor within the borders of glittering metropolises; the disparity between their lives and of their families at home when compared to urban residents is jarring and a potential political threat.  

China has found a solution to both of these problems by using high-tech solutions. Wang, while traveling through the countryside, discovers that although villagers may not have indoor plumbing, they receive 4G and 5G cellular service. Through their mobile phones, they’re connected to Taobao.com, an e-commerce site with a user base that’s double that of Amazon’s, with 600 million active users every month. Owned by the tech giant, Alibaba, Taobao connects villagers with consumers, provides delivery of their products, collects and disburses payments, and has made cash obsolete. Even for small transactions, payments are made through AliPay and WeChat (owned by Alibaba’s rival Tencent), over the phone. 

Through e-commerce, communities of subsistence farmers have become Taobao villages, selling everything from eggs to Halloween costumes over the internet to customers all over the world through AliExpress. Youths who migrated to cities are returning home; if they need capital to launch their online business, they can borrow money through Alipay.

It is, Wang says, “as if Amazon decided it suddenly wanted to offer assistance to an Appalachian coal-mining town by helping its citizens start candy businesses and offering them Amazon-backed loans.”

To combat China’s second political threat, safe food is available for those who can afford it. For $40 apiece, free-range, vegetable-fed, three-month-old butchered chickens with an ankle bracelet attached to one leg are delivered to affluent residences . A scan of a QR code on  the bracelet brings up the records of that chicken’s provenance, life, and stages of its shipment, from a livestream of its time in the farmyard to the results of the test it was given every two weeks, to how it was handled on its journey. Each of these records is linked to the previous one in a system that will reject any falsification that deviates from the required norm. It’s a block chain that takes the burden of trust from human beings and puts it into the code behind the chain--and Wang points out, into the coders who wrote it. The farmer who raised this expensive chicken grosses only about 14 dollars per bird but he has sold 6000 chickens, Wang assures readers.

Pork is an integral part of the Chinese diet and “China is the only country in the world to have a pork reserve,” similar to the wheat reserves in the US. Chinese pork is used in Western products--”from bloodclotting heparin to the protein powders in our smoothies.” In 2013 China’s WH Group bought Smithfield, legendary producer of American ham and expanded it into a mammoth collection of industrial pig farms that pose environmental problems to their neighbors.

In 2018 African swine fever hit China, killing pigs and prompting fears of a nation-wide pork riot. ASF arrived, it was determined, through human error. “Human farmers are inefficient in an optimized world,” so Alibaba turned to AI as a solution with the ultimate goal of replacing pig farmers and “the clumsy irrationality of meat machines” with bodies that are powered by artificial intelligence. 

Science fiction? No, Wang posits, a science future, in which humans may well be given a monthly stipend in order to fulfill their role--to buy things made by automated beings and enrich those who own it all, including the consumers.

Shenzhen native Naomi Wu calls herself the “Sexy Cyborg,” born human but “with cyborg body modifications, including breast implants that light up when she dons a special corset she’s designed and built.” A professional coder, an Instagram star, and a DIY maker at Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, Wu’s ambition is to have a shop where 3D printers will produce body parts on demand for women who want to change their human form--an extension of what exists now as plastic surgery.

Early in this book Wang meets a farmer who claims that the future is a human construct, that we exist only in the present and in the work we do there every day. At the conclusion, Wang finds a similar school of thought in Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, in which he calls for a liberation from “living for imagined futures.” Instead we should live for “a sense of purpose, a sense of being needed.” “Without a future, I must give myself over to the present,” Wang realizes.

After wandering through what could be the future of the world as it exists in present-day China, Wang concludes with “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning.” It’s a message that grounds and reassures readers who may feel dizzy with the infinite possibilities and the nagging sense of terror that gleam through the vision presented by Block Chain Chicken Farm. ~Janet Brown

A longer review of this book can be read at www.asiabythebook.com/voa/2021/1/6/a-primer-to-the-future