Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

by Xiaowei Wang

Metronormativity is pervasive—it’s the normative, standard idea that somehow rural culture and rural people are backward, conservative, and intolerant, and that the only way to live with freedom is to leave the countryside for highly connected urban oases. Metronormativity fuels the notion that the internet, technology, and media literacy will somehow “save” or “educate” rural people, either by allowing them to experience the broader world, offering new livelihoods, or reducing misinformation.

A large red sign across from the newly constructed hospital reads BEING LAZY IS A DISGRACE, BEING SELF-RELIANT LEADS TO STRENGTH (好吃懒惰不光彩, 自力更生才出彩). It’s one of the many political slogans that are part of the government’s poverty-alleviation policy, and eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Hustle hard. Underneath the large red sign is a woman at a desolate fruit stand rearranging the oranges in her crate over and over. Hustle has come to Sanqiao.

The official name is Bubuji (步步鸡), or GoGoChicken, as some English PR materials call it. The COO of Shanghai Lianmo Technology, the company behind blockchain chicken, says that he explicitly keeps “blockchain” out of the name. To him, overhyped blockchain projects have turned the term “blockchain” into marketing gloss. These blockchain chickens sell for up to RMB 300 (US$40) on JD.com. Typical buyers are upper-class urbanites—people willing to pay a premium on food.

Jiang shows us around the rest of the farm—several pristine feeding areas, and the “control” room where the base station sits. Each chicken wears an ankle bracelet that is physically tamperproof, which tracks characteristics such as number of steps taken and the location of the chicken. A chicken Fitbit of sorts. The front plate of the ankle bracelet has a QR code on it. All this data is viewable on a website accessible with a password, and the website includes constantly streaming surveillance footage of the chickens to ensure that they have not been adulterated in any way by an intruder. There’s also a map of the chickens’ movements.

These chickens are delivered to consumers’ doors, butchered and vacuum sealed, with the ankle bracelet still attached, so customers can scan the QR code before preparing the chicken. Scanning this code leads them to a page with details about the chicken’s life, including its weight, the number of steps it took, and its photograph. In Shanghai, these details are seen as a sign of authenticity and food safety,

In the car, driving through the small mountain paths back to the bus stop, I ask Ren, “So, what do you think of qukuailian [blockchain, 区块链]?” Although we’ve seen the GoGoChicken farm, I haven’t explicitly brought up blockchain at all during my visit. “Blockchain? What’s blockchain?” asks Ren.

However, blockchain has yet to answer the question: If it takes power away from a central authority, can it truly put power back in the hands of the people, and not just a select group of people? Will it serve as an infrastructure that amplifies trust, rather than increasing both mistrust and a singular reliance on technical infrastructure? Will it provide ways to materially organize and enrich a community, rather than further accelerating financial systems that serve a select few? Can the community expand and diversify itself, so that it does not reproduce the system of power and patriarchy that it is attempting to dismantle?

We operate under game theory conditions, under market forces, under the belief that we will lie to each other because someone else has more, and we have more to gain. And so we create solutions that further exacerbate this inequality. This is what happens when resources like food are treated as commodities to be bought and sold, to make money from, instead of as a basic human right.

an industrial pig farm is more like an iPhone factory than a bucolic countryside haven. Each herd is watched and monitored on-screen for any signs of sickness or disease. When human intervention is required, people enter wearing disinfected hazmat suits and face masks, looking less like the blockchain chicken farmer Jiang and more like a worker inside a silicon chip factory.

The farm in Lushan has the precision of an electronics factory and the feeling of the world’s most sterile, meticulous resort. On this farm, pigs live an optimized life, with an optimal amount of exercise and an optimal swill mix. They even listen to a soothing soundtrack, carefully designed for stress relief. This music is beneficial for us, as pork eaters. Stress before slaughter can alter a pig’s metabolism, increasing cortisol and resulting in what’s known in the industry as “DFD” (dark, firm, dry) meat.

Pig life is still on my mind. I wonder: Can life be optimized? And if it can, what would you even optimize for?

Most of my time is spent like this—countryside trips buffered by stops in cities, where I gorge on meals that cost as much as a few months’ income for a farmer.

For every video camera in a public place, for every surveillance lens watching you, there’s a mirror, a screen placed for you to watch ads, cartoons, and news in a hypnotic glaze of content.

If embracing failure is the prerequisite for innovation, who has the privilege of failing?

She’s especially amused by photos of me camping and hiking, activities that are just starting to become popular in China, where the “pleasures of wild nature” are brazenly acknowledged as a made-up concept that requires marketing.

New shanzhai is open source on hyperspeed, an unapologetic confrontation with Western ideas of intellectual property. The designers and engineers of new shanzhai products build on each other’s work, co-opting, repurposing, and remixing

American corporations are threatening university students researching new technologies with patent lawsuits, shanzhai feels more urgent than ever. Outside the well-funded confines of places like Silicon Valley, for the rest of the world that can’t afford US$400 3D-modeling software or US$300 phones that can be repaired only by experts, shanzhai is desperately needed. How can you even begin to innovate if you can’t afford the tools needed for innovation?

Shanzhai pushes the boundaries of what we currently think of as innovation and argues for the right not only to use a device or software but also to collaboratively alter, change, and reclaim it—a shanzhai economy instead of an innovation economy.

young men and women who have left their rural homes in search of economic opportunity. As migrants they are called liudongrenkou (流动人口) in Chinese, the “floating population”—a floating population in a floating world.

There’s some places crowded with bunk beds that allow double the capacity. Night workers sleep in the beds during the day, day workers sleep in the same beds at night.”

“Can data ever know who we really are?” asks the policy researcher and activist Zara Rahman.3 For my friend and many others, the data on a past crime remains committed to his record. And while his life changes—he becomes a friend, a husband, a doting father, an artist, an uncle—all the data points about his past remain static. Data cannot truly represent the full spectrum of life. It remains a thin slice of the world. There is always some kind of bias built in. Yet we imagine numbers to mean something, and this creates a common tendency that the statistician Philip B. Stark calls “quantifauxcation”: the attempt to assign numbers or quantify phenomenon, as if quantitative data can offer certainty.4 Some strategies for quantifauxcation, says Stark, include saying things people want to believe, and adding opaque complexity to models, since complexity has become conflated with accuracy.

“How much is it?” I ask, and it takes him a minute to think through this. It’s clear that in this village, there are no hungry capitalists yet, no price stickers and scales. Finally, he says, “Is RMB 10 (US$1.40) a fair price? Can you pay me via WeChat?”

The village is pursuing a tourism strategy common in China—“cultural tourism,” which amps up the cultural capital of being a certified ethnic minority village. It explains the over-the-top performance of Dong culture in this development plan. Guesthouses abound through the village, along with single trees strategically placed by the roads, an odd detail given that Shangdiping is surrounded by forests of pine and ficus trees, punctuated by bamboo. I had to ask an obvious question: “Last time I was here, I had to use the bathroom and it was a wooden board with a hole in it, placed over the river, a small fence for privacy. Will the development plan address this … issue?” Fujiang laughs. “Yes, yes, we’re going to put in a wastewater system for the entire town. After that, it’s easy. We’ve already got broadband internet. Upstairs is our home and there are some extra rooms. We’re ready for tourists. Even now you can find us on the internet. Just look up ‘Slowly, Slowly Guesthouse and Restaurant.’ And let me know when you’re coming next. Bring all your friends!”

A Taobao village is a place where more than 10 percent of the village households are manufacturing at home for Taobao.com.

It also has its own rural research institute, AliResearch, which examines the business cycles of Taobao villages to understand their successes and failures.

Dinglou was officially designated by Alibaba in 2012 as the first Taobao village. Since then, the number of Taobao villages has soared from 1,311 in 2016 to 3,202 across twenty-four provinces in China in 2018. When I talked to one researcher at AliResearch, he was hopeful that the number would grow. After all, it’s a win-win model for Alibaba and economists in the central government. It repopulates the countryside and addresses the “hollowed-out village” phenomenon. Young people who leave places like Dinglou village find themselves coming back home instead of staying in cities. One official document from Dinglou boasts that five hundred college students have returned home because of the thriving e-commerce, which is a population boom for a village.

In 2018, a widely circulated online survey by Toutiao, a popular news app, revealed that 54 percent of parents rely on their children to cover living expenses.

Shopping has made consumption the site of political action rather than the enemy of it. Although many of us have jobs that keep us occupied, the real work we do these days is shopping, and especially shopping online. Economists across the world make it clear that we are in a consumer-driven economy. Shopping is an ecstasy-inducing act, a brief tease that allows us to brush up against the life we desire, that we feel like we deserve. So much exists in the service of shopping, one of the world’s biggest religions.

“Alibaba sucks us dry,” he says. “It sucks the blood out of us, and it will suck the blood out of this village. As sellers, all our money is kept in Alipay because that’s how buyers send money. At the drop of a pin they can demand a refund, and because of the escrow service, the money gets sent back to them, even if I’ve shipped the order already. Or maybe they don’t like the material, they think it’s cheap. But we have to keep on making worse-quality stuff. How are we supposed to keep prices low and also compete with others? The government thinks it’s great and keeps doing things like building roads, putting in broadband. And Alibaba uses all this infrastructure for free, relies on us to make decisions on lowering the quality of goods. But what happens next? There’s only so much cutting corners we can do. There’s only so many ads we can buy, lies about the products we can say. What happens when this system fails?”

My small choice to either buy or not buy exerts control over the world as I want to see it—as I imagine it, maybe more eco-friendly, more sustainable. But what if I didn’t need to assert control at all? What would it mean to define my daily life without any of the packages that arrive at my doorstep, to invent a life that required no material possessions?

In that light, the post-2016-election pleas for all of us to log off and just talk to each other in real life are naive. We haven’t been talking to one another in real life for a long time. Unless, apparently, we’re trying to sell each other something.

But culture and community, not technology, are the driving force behind its power, its threat to the elite. As internet researchers such as An Xiao Mina and sociologists have shown, the driving force behind broader sociopolitical change has always been culture, with or without the internet.7 Cultural change comes before political change, and that cultural change starts with us. It is up to us to make meaning, to make new symbols.