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

by Xiaowei Wang

The hukou system reveals the unabashed directness of socialist central planning. There is no dark magic like the American Dream, a sugarcoating that lets you believe in an imagined freedom, when really, the way we have structured our capitalist economy in the United States also relies on distinct labor and class differences. In central planning, rural laborers and peasants must efficiently produce food to feed the nation, to sustain a knowledge-based workforce in cities.

A 2001 article from The New York Times about economic revitalization in rural America said that building prisons was more effective than building Walmarts or meatpacking plants in stimulating economic growth. As the abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes in her book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, prisons were purposefully constructed in rural California throughout the 1990s with an economic agenda. The rural prison industry was fueled by policy makers trying to alleviate the economic crisis, because even as crime rates declined across America, prison populations grew.

China has one of the largest rates of income inequality in the world, due to the rural-urban income gap. Rural migrants work for little pay in cities but are unable to actually stay in urban areas. Yet hukou system reform is beginning, although there are new signs that rural hukou holders are less enthusiastic about switching to urban hukous.

At the core of rural culture, he says, is a belief that the universe is already perfect as it is, and that our duty as humans is to maintain that harmony.

One farmer told me that the future is a created concept, and that in the fields, in the long dark of winters, there is no future, because every day depends on tending to the present moment. An act of care. In contrast, urban culture is centered on the belief that the universe must be constantly corrected on its course, and that life is defined by the pleasure of overcoming future challenges.