| Blockchain Chicken Farm | |
| Author: | Xiaowei Wang |
| Publisher: | FSG Originals x Logic |
| Pub Date: | 13 October 2020 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Isbn: | 978-0-374-53866-8 |
| Dewey: | 609.51[1] |
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside is a 2020 non-fiction book by Xiaowei Wang, a Chinese-American artist, writer, and software engineer. The book explores the impact of technology on rural China, especially in relation to agriculture and food safety. It consists of several vignettes that illustrate how technology is used and adapted in rural China, both by individuals and by urban corporations, and how this impacts global society.
Over the course of the book, Wang travels across China to visit places such as a "blockchain chicken farm" where chickens are tracked by QR codes to certify their free range status, a pearl farming village that exports pearls to US-based multi-level marketing companies, and a Halloween costume factory run by the e-commerce giant Taobao based in a small town. Wang conducted their research over the late 2010s, motivated by the desire to address their own biases in favour of urban areas.
Blockchain Chicken Farm was published by FSG Originals x Logic, a collaboration between Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the technology magazine Logic. The book received widespread attention from critics following its release, being featured on several recommendations lists and awarded the National Book Foundation's 2023 Science + Literature prize. It was also commended for its nuance, detail, and unique perspective on technology and society. Though reception trended positive, some reviewers criticized the book for its lack of a clear thesis, its superficiality, or its misrepresentation of some concepts.
China has rapidly industrialized since the mid to late twentieth century.[2] One consequence is the emergence of substantial income inequality between China's urban and rural regions; inequality peaked in 2009, with a per capita income in urban areas thrice that of rural areas, and has since stabilized.[3] [4] A distinctive feature of Chinese internal migration is the hukou system, a form of household registration where people are assigned a "rural" or "urban" status based on the circumstances of their birth; the location of one's hukou determines eligibility for services such as schools, hospitals, pensions, housing, and employment in an area. Due to the difficulties in changing one's hukou, many migrants from rural to urban China lack access to such services in their place of residence. Though the hukou system has been reformed multiple times, it remains strict.[5] [6]
Food safety is a widespread concern in China, spurred by numerous high-profile controversies regarding contaminated or misrepresented food. To serve China's rapidly growing urban middle class, who increase the country's demand both for meat and for higher-quality food, farmers and companies have attempted technological solutions to guarantee their products' freshness and safety. This includes the eponymous "blockchain chicken farms", where chickens are tracked by QR code to certify their free range status and sold at a premium.[7]
Xiaowei Wang is a Chinese-American artist, writer, and software engineer with a Ph.D. in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. Blockchain Chicken Farm is their first book.[8] Wang was inspired to investigate technology in rural China as a critique of "metronormativity", a term defined by Jack Halberstam as a disproportionate focus on urban environments motivated by a stigma against rural cultures and societies.
Blockchain Chicken Farm focuses on the impact of technology in rural China, particularly as it relates to agriculture. The first major focus of the book is the "blockchain chicken farms" run by Bubuji, also known as GoGoChicken, a subsidiary of the technology arm of ZhongAn, China's largest insurance company. Wang visits a farm in Guizhou owned by Jiang, a farmer who turned to GoGoChicken after sales for his free range chickens declined due to distrust of their provenance. In Wang's discussions with Jiang and Ren, a local government employee, they discover the people involved with the project have little understanding of what technology underpins it. Though the blockchain chickens are profitable, selling for up to (US$) to a market of upper-middle-class consumers, Jiang's enterprise sales dry up shortly after the first order, raising concerns about their long-term viability.
The book then addresses the African swine fever outbreak of the late 2010s, which killed a substantial share of pigs in China, the world's largest pork producer. African swine fever had never been reported in China prior to 2018, and is a difficult disease to eradicate; pigs that survive infection remain carriers for the rest of their life, and exported pork products are able to spread the disease internationally. Wang ascribes the ASF outbreak to industrialized pig farming. The most nutritionally optimal pig swill is cannibalistic, feeding pork products to pigs themselves, which creates vectors for ASF to spread from infected to uninfected pigs. Wang states that the practice of "optimizing" farming allows for such externalities to occur and worsen.
Wang then addresses the role of artificial intelligence in the workforce. Inspired by a discussion with a stranger on a train to Shanghai, Wang argues that religion in China is seeing a resurgence as a reaction to increasing social alienation driven by technology. They posit that the ideal purpose of AI in the workforce is not to "take" jobs from humans, but to collaborate with humans in their existing jobs, giving the example of an AI aiding doctors in diagnosis versus one replacing a social worker who supports patients.
Blockchain Chicken Farm next section discusses China's urbanrural education gap. The book relates the Chinese government's attempts to improve educational standards in rural areas, where very few students complete high school or attend university. Wang meets Sun Wei, a young man who works in a gig economy-like role as a drone operator, and contrasts his career expectations both with gig economy employees in the West and with his peers with higher educational achievements. They argue that Sun Wei is less marginalized or alienated as an employee than true gig economy employees, given his passion for his work, but that his role is relatively peripheral compared to that of a more traditionally credentialed employee.
The last chapters address subjects such as Chinese manufacturing, mass surveillance, and discrimination against ethnic minorities in China. At the close of the book, Wang travels to rural Zhejiang, the centre of the country's massive pearl farming industry. They analyse the international nature of Zhejiang's pearl industry, which exports a substantial number of pearls to US-based multi-level marketing companies. In the United States, these pearls are distributed to influencers who host livestreamed "pearl parties", shucking oysters to see the pearls that come out. Wang discusses the economic position of people involved in multi-level marketing, noting that the states with the highest proportion of direct sellers, North Dakota, Iowa, and Wyoming, all have above-average unemployment rates.
The chapters of Blockchain Chicken Farm are interspersed with recipes. These recipes use an intentionally science-fiction styling. The first, a porridge with goji berries, is described as food for a hypothetical artificial intelligence that needed to eat to survive; the second is inspired by DNA digital data storage, using tofu fritters as an analogy to the process of storing DNA on soybeans; and the third, a recipe for mooncakes, is styled as a meal prepared from moon-grown ingredients, with the cornmeal custard filling presented as made from corn grown on the Moon.
The research for Blockchain Chicken Farm mostly occurred from 2016 to 2018, though it continued through to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.[9] Wang travelled to various districts of rural China, such as Dinglou in Pinghe County, where the e-commerce retailer Taobao had created economic incentives to centralize Halloween costume production, and rural Zhejiang, a centre of pearl farming, where pearls were shipped to international multi-level marketing companies. A particular focus of the book is the eponymous "blockchain chicken farm", a farm in Guizhou in southwestern China where the smallholder farmer had been unable to convince purchasers that his chickens were genuinely free-range. GoGoChicken, a Shanghai-based company, recruited him to a blockchain-based surveillance scheme where the chickens were monitored to guarantee their status.
The primary driver behind most technological applications Wang discusses is the desire to improve food safety standards or confirm their enforcement; due to several high-profile Chinese controversies around food safety, the subject is of substantial concern to the nation's emerging urban middle class. Simultaneously, being able to technologically prove that a given farm has high standards provides an incentive to source products from that farm, potentially improving the financial state of the farmer.