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

by Xiaowei Wang

“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?”