A Primer to the Future

“It pays to produce a pathogen that could kill a billion people.” This quote from evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace’s Big Farms Make Big Flu (NYU Press 2016) leaps out from Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm like a punch to the gut. We’ve read how Amazon has reaped vast profits from Covid-19 and they are not alone. Every grocery store, delivery service, and entertainment livestream presenter has benefited from the coronavirus. Our suffering is their profit--and this isn’t a new development. Industrial farms, with their “optimization processes,” blithely produce cheap food without regard for the health of those who will eat it, as uncaring as small-scale manufacturers in China who killed babies by adding melamine to infant formula, or others “cutting production by half” through adding ground-up human hair to soy sauce.

The big difference is Chinese people are aware of their country’s lack of food safety, which lags behind Mexico and Turkey. In a Shenzhen mall a restaurant sign assured customers that they use their cooking oil only once and a manager of a coffee shop in that same city once told me “You must be very careful with water, food, anything you put in your mouth.” Supermarkets selling imported food are commonplace. And, Wang tells us, food safety is an issue that threatens the future of the Chinese government.

The rural population of China is 40% of the country’s population and 8% of the world’s total. For millennia, farmers have worked on plots of land that are no larger than two football fields, in “a basic form of poverty alleviation.” They subsist on what they can grow on land they do not own. Displacing them with industrialized agriculture poses another political threat.

So does the migration of young rural residents to China’s cities. The higher wages found there are lessened by the higher cost of living. Migrant workers replicate the conditions they left behind in “urban villages” and the squalor of what they have contrasts cruelly with the metropolitan luxury they see every day.

How China is bringing those migrants home with a new village-based economy is a story that almost defies the Western imagination. 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.”

Alibaba is China’s answer to Amazon. Its online shopping site, Taobao, has double the active monthly users of Amazon--and it’s not unique in China. Its fellow-tech giant, Tencent, in 2019 had 1,164 million active monthly users on its social media site, WeChat, buyers and sellers as well as chatterers. Both entities have made cash obsolete in China with Alipay and WeChat Wallet, transmitting transactions over mobile phones.

Wang discovers that no matter how remote a Chinese village may be, although it may lack indoor plumbing, it has 4G and 5G cellular service. In a distant village where Wang asks to buy some of a restaurant’s chili paste, the transaction is only $1.40 US but the proprietor asks that it be paid through WeChat. Chinese tourists complain that when traveling abroad, they have to use cash. 

Taobao has gone to great lengths in making villages computer-literate. They train a few inhabitants to become “brand ambassadors” who then train their neighbors in the ways of e-commerce at a Rural Taobao Service Center housed in a local convenience store. Villagers learn how to shop on Taobao, buy railway tickets without facing the scrum of a train station, and make doctor’s appointments. Eventually they learn how to sell products that come from their farms and from their homes. Wang meets one village millionaire who began making costumes for photography studios and now exports them all over the world, sent via AliExpress and transacted through Alipay. He lives in the first of the Taobao villages, where “more than ten percent of the village households are manufacturing at home for Taobao.com. Begun in 2012, Taobao villages have caught the interest of the World Bank and Alibaba’s Electronic World Trade Platform has outposts in Malaysia, Rwanda, and South Africa.

Perhaps most important, youthful migrants are returning to their villages, lured by e-commerce and supported by loans from Alipay when needed. 

“Shopping is powerful,” Wang points out, “instilling a cruel optimism.” In a self-definition as “a Han Chinese American expat, Harvard educated, a dutiful American citizen,” who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, Wang admits “online shopping is a meditative act for me.” They see it as “aspirational spending” that lures consumers worldwide. And when the transaction is completed, it’s likely to end up in a Chinese Alipay or WeChat Wallet account. China’s new revolution is financed by global purchases.

Food safety is becoming the norm for Chinese who can afford it, enriching the farmers who produce it. Chickens, butchered and ready to cook, are delivered to affluent households, who can trace the safety of their poultry by scanning a QR code on the chicken's ankle bracelet. This brings up the entire history of the bird’s three-month life and its journey from farm to table via records in a system that rejects any falsification, one record building on the next in a block chain that has been developed by coders. Faith in the producer has been transferred to faith in the code, but as Wang points out, we all put our lives into the hands of  software every day--on planes and trains. 

For this free-range, vegetable-fed chicken, the consumer pays the equivalent of forty US dollars. The farmer receives only fourteen of them, but at least in one case, he will have sold 6000 chickens.

Although Chinese farmers reject the idea of industrial farms, China’s appetite for pork is so vast that the government holds a pork reserve in the same way that the US government maintains one for wheat. A pork shortage could provoke the same sort of rioting that a shortage of bread caused in France just before its revolution. With this in mind, in 2013 China’s WH Group bought America’s Smithfield Foods. The producers of legendary hams are now wholly owned by a Chinese business group which has extended its industrial farms in addition to the traditional family-run variety and has created “an environmental headache for the communities that live around them.” However these communities are far from China.

Within China, the panic instilled by African swine fever that threatened to kill every pig within its range has increased scrutiny upon human error on pig farms. Alibaba’s ET Agricultural Brain is working on using artificial intelligence to raise pigs, their goal one of eventually replacing human “meat machines” with robotic beings of AI.

It’s here that Wang extrapolates into the future, where robots are the workers and humans are paid a monthly stipend to meet living expenses and to shop, thereby enriching those who own it all. Not so impossible--Andrew Yang addressed this in his campaign for president and it’s certain to come up again. But, Wang asks, in this future where is the sense of commitment, where is “the poetry of living”?

Perhaps Shenzhen native Naomi Wu has an answer. Found on Instagram as @reallysexycyborg, Wu disguises her tech expertise under self-designed outfits that could get her arrested in most corners of the world, clothing that generously reveals her implanted balloon breasts. But this is only advertising for an art form whose gallery is Wu’s body. She’s a DIY maker and engineer, a wizard with a 3-D printer, “born human but she is a self-proclaimed cyborg...with cyborg body modifications.” Wu’s dream is to have her own shop in Shenzhen’s largest electronic market where she’ll sell cyborg body parts to women who want only the best arms, the best eyes. As Wu says, in a world of algorithms, “You have to give the computer what it wants.”

In the beginning of this journey into China, Wang meets a farmer who says “the future is a created construct, that in the fields, in the long dark of winter, there is no future, because every day depends on tending to the present moment.” Later when Wang is back in the US, they find a similar, more academic idea. Lee Edelman in his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, claims “most of us end up creating a culture where political action is premised on the illusory figure of ‘the Child’, “trying to live for the child who does not exist.” “Stuck in a cycle of chasing after the future,” we should reject this in favor of existing fully in the present with “a sense of purpose, a sense of being needed.” 

When Wang looks ahead, “I am exhausted trying to conjure a blurry future.” “Without a future,” they decide, “I must give myself over to the present.” 

After wandering with Wang through what could be the world’s future as it’s practiced every day of this present in China, time becomes a foldable artificiality, as we’re all learning through the period dominated by Covid-19. All of us, along with Wang, are presented with “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning.”

Blockchain Chicken Farm is unlike any book most of us have ever read, made up of essays that are part travel literature, part investigative journalism, part an explanation of technological advances and influences, and completely suffused with personal observations and a generous dash of poetry. Influenced by M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas, Wang has included fantastical, surreal recipes, projecting into a future that may well be happening now, given the rapid rate of change in China. (Witness the disappearance of Jack Ma and the possible diminishment of the Alibaba empire.). 

Wang is as unclassifiable as these essays, “an artist, a writer, a coder,” it says on the back of their book. Wang, in an interview, rejects the term “writer” as being too narrow, choosing “artist” instead. Initially studying to become a landscape architect, Wang found that to design a space or a park, software was used and began to think of its limitations. Realizing “how software can restrict or shape designs or how you think of the communities that you design for,” they became a software engineer who thinks of “inventing new Chinese characters to bypass automated censorship.” Creative Director for Logic, a magazine that exists in print and online, Wang says their “writing gives people a way to understand or interact in the world.” Most certainly it expands the world for readers in ways they might not expect. As Wang says, when writing about China for Americans, “fantasy and sci-fi are always palpable.”~Janet Brown