by Xiaowei Wang
On this winter night, as I sit across from my great-uncle, he’s tapping away on his WeChat—the Chinese messaging app made by Tencent that has ballooned to include a plethora of other functions, including mobile payment and numerous internal apps, a secondary set of platforms embedded inside WeChat called “mini programs.” The last time I had visited both him and my great-aunt, who was still in good health, was 2009. I was living in Beijing at the time. The high-speed train between Beijing and Tianjin had just been completed a year prior, shortening an hour-and-a-half journey to thirty minutes. None of us had smartphones then. Without the watchful weight of a screen in my pocket, a device anchoring and tracking my movements, I floated, as beipiao—a drifter like millions of other migrants who moved to Beijing seeking a future. Fewer screens and fewer surveillance cameras meant I was free to spend late nights wandering along Chang’an Avenue, past Mao’s mausoleum, through the hutong alley bars that had not yet been dismantled, past the vegetable sellers who still lined Beijing’s narrow streets and the windows of migrant workers’ homes that were still intact, unbroken by police.
The easy argument is that the world is moving faster, becoming more controlled because of the internet and mobile devices. But the gravity of acceleration is not inevitable. The way we experience time has changed; the kind of critical wonder we hold toward objects has collapsed. My great-uncle once sat in amazement looking at the new Japanese-made TV we bought him, at how crisp the image was, and how remarkable it was that so much complex circuitry could fit inside a thin screen. He now looks up from his smartphone occasionally, complaining how slow his phone is at opening apps.
While he’s busy sending Toutiao news articles to his friends, I look at my own device. The darkened screen beckons to me, reflecting back like an ancient scrying mirror, a device used for divination, a mirror on which to project all our desires. The future, in perpetuity. One of the gifts of the free market has been precisely that: the delusion that we are free of the past, expanding ever outward into a startling, wild future abetted by the free market, liberalism, and technology. The end of history, as Francis Fukuyama would call it. I have traded a family story, subject to the forces of political will, for a life that changes and moves under economic forces, through the will of financial capital, of Alibaba and Amazon. And it remains to be seen just how the inhabitants of the new socialist countryside will embrace this same free market futurity.
As I stare harder into my blank screen, I realize I don’t see the future of the internet, of technology, the future of China’s place in the world, but simply the place where I am now: Tianjin, a city that was always subject to global forces, simple geographies, degrees separated from its past. I see Tianjin’s port, the Haihe River winding through the city to the ocean, and how the skyscrapers gleam against the glassy waves of the Bohai Sea. Tianjin, as it is, a place that does not have to be read in relation to someone else’s history. No single vision of an imagined nation, no single person staking a claim to dictate everyone’s future, either on this side of the Pacific or the other. I see so clearly the constant mental images nations have or make of each other. A world politics based on mirrors. What is China but a projection of American fears and desires? And for China, what is the United States but a projection of desires and fears? Nationalist dreams stand, dull and mute, nothing more than a point between dream and illusion. There is nothing to be gained by dreaming, and everything to be gained by seeing.
How to Feed an AI
How would moving beyond machine-human boundaries and Western models of mind-body dualism bring new life to AI research? This recipe speculates on just that—when a group of AI researchers use traditional Chinese medicine, a five-thousand-year-old system of medical practices and philosophy, to advance technology. It is not new for proposals for eating and nutrition to be foundational to philosophy, from the core tenets of Taoism and Buddhism to works on macrobiotic diets by George Ohsawa and Aveline Kushi. Seeing the body as a holistic system, non-Western theories of the body allow for new ways of thinking through substance, matter, and being, which are core to the project of building sentient artificial intelligence. These non-Western theories have been marginalized throughout time by the forces of imperialism and colonialism.
Ingredients
dong quai (Angelica sinensis) | 9 g
goji berries | 9 g
ginger, cut into coarse slices | 16 g
whole red dates, chopped | 12
soy milk | 2,000 ml
uncooked white rice | 200 g
dried apricots, diced | 100 g
While companies in the West promised self-driving cars and fully sentient machines by 2020, neural networks used in AI are still constrained by a number of factors, including the specificity of training data for AI models, which is said to create a “generalization problem”: an inability to adapt to unseen new data. For example, AI models trained to perform facial recognition can classify well-lit images with great accuracy, but have a difficult time classifying faces if the photos are obscured, occluded, or shown in different lighting conditions than the images on which the AI model was trained. This barrier, along with increasing techno-pessimism, led to a decreased public interest in AI.
In the midst of winter 2022, when venture capital funding and public enthusiasm for AI dried up, a group of Chinese scientists and researchers at the Alibaba AI lab took up the task of generalizing AI models. Instead of Western philosophies of mind, they started from Chinese theories of the body, Chinese medicine, and Buddhist thought. In Western medicine, models of the body center around the brain, which controls other organs, the processes that regulate our body, consciousness, and emotion. In Chinese medicine, there are eleven vital organs that work holistically to sustain life, and this list does not include the brain. Brain functions are scattered throughout the body.
Researchers managed to create a pretrained neural network with electrical inputs and outputs from a combination of artificial and human organs. This hybrid machine was able to perform broader tasks without further training data; however, it was still not fully sentient. Scientists believe further development is needed to better understand what other parts of the body creative and language functions reside in. Yet the ability of the machine to extend its thinking was the first breakthrough in a long, icy AI winter.
The system did not have access to typical conduits for qi (the defining force in Chinese medicine), such as hair, skin, or muscle, to send to the machine-meat hybrid. In order to nourish this system of organs and neural networks, it had to be constantly fed tonifying food: foods to nourish the vital organs in the system.
This porridge was developed by researchers to nourish and tonify the system. It’s quick and easy to make. You can use a pressure cooker, an Instant Pot, or a rice cooker with a porridge setting. Make sure the rice-to-soy-milk ratio is 1:10. After that, put in the other ingredients (dong quai, goji berries, ginger, red dates, dried apricots). Bring the mixture to a boil and then simmer for 1 hour, or run the porridge setting on your Instant Pot.
2
On a Blockchain Chicken Farm in the Middle of Nowhere
1.
There is a cell phone service blackout in the city of Zhenjiang on the day I visit the Vinegar Culture Museum. As I leave the bullet train station, I frantically tap my ride-hailing app, DiDi, in hopes that some car will show up on the screen. My phone doesn’t have 4G or even 3G, just a puny little one-bar signal, for emergency calls.
It’s a balmy day in Zhenjiang, a small city outside Nanjing, the old imperial capital for the Ming dynasty, before Beijing was even on a map. During childhood trips to China, my mental categorization of places was based on whether or not a city had a McDonald’s, an approximation of the “tiered city” system. Throughout China, the tiered city system is like an economic badge, calculated by a mystical formula that takes in the city’s contribution to GDP, average monthly incomes, and housing prices. First-tier cities include Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai, places that have dozens of Mc
Donald’s restaurants scattered throughout. Third-tier cities like Zhenjiang are much smaller, with maybe only one or two McDonald’s restaurants alongside a slew of knockoffs.
I give up trying to find a signal and wave down a taxicab. The driver eagerly asks: “Guess you had to take a cab, not a DiDi, right? No cell phone service?” He explains that there’s a serious protest in Zhenjiang today. Thousands of People’s Liberation Army veterans have arrived from all parts of China, staging a massive protest by marching on the main city square. In response, the government shut down cell phone service in the downtown area, hoping to keep photos off social media and WeChat.
“What are they protesting about?” I ask. “Pensions,” the taxi driver answers, and I see his grimace reflected in the rearview mirror. “What kind of society are we turning into,” he says, “where we don’t even give old army vets their pensions?”
I nod in agreement and we both fall silent, neither of us wanting to continue on the topic. In Xi Jinping’s China, it’s uncomfortable for two strangers to go too deep into the subject of zhengzhi (politics, 政治). There are no clear-cut consequences for discussing politics—after all, this is precisely how the system of censorship works, with a shadowy unease that looms over public conversations. Censorship is not made explicit; you just censor yourself. No one knows the consequences of critique, but no one wants to find out.
The Zhenjiang Vinegar Culture Museum is bustling today, and the guided tour I am on is full. The museum is located next to the Hengshun vinegar company’s main factory, and pungent smells of fermentation waft through the building. Several college students are here, enjoying an outing without authority figures. A bored teenager is accompanied by her parents—when I ask where they are coming from, her parents tell me Nanjing, and that this is a celebratory post-gaokao trip. The gaokao is China’s grueling university-entry test that spans three days, as the entire nation waits with anticipation for the average score. The nation’s obsession with gaokao is similar to an academic March Madness. During gaokao week, weather and map apps on your phone will text to alert you: “It’s raining, don’t forget your umbrella on the way to the gaokao!” or “It’s gaokao season, don’t forget to be quiet and courteous! Valuing education and the future of our children are our socialist values!”
The tour meanders through a section on the historical vinegar-making process, where a large sign boasts VINEGAR TECHNOLOGY. Images printed on foam core of jet-black vinegar in bowls are mounted on the walls. Traditional Chinese vinegar is an inky substance that is both fragrant and sour.
At many tourist locations in China, tour guides and exhibits like to remind you that China was the first. The first in what? Well, just about anything. The first to invent gunpowder or paper, or to build a crazy-long wall … and vinegar is no exception. According to one panel, making vinegar was part of the Qimin Yaoshu, or Essential Techniques for the Welfare of the People, written 1,500 years ago, back when Europe was still in the Dark Ages. This was the text Charles Darwin referred to in studies on evolution, due to the Qimin Yaoshu’s references to breeding and animal domestication, reaffirming that the Chinese were the first to notice how genetic variation works.
The tour concludes in a mirrored hall with hundreds of vinegars on the shelf, from Heinz white vinegar to different types of balsamic. The tour guide cheerily describes it as a pleasant global vinegar showcase. She solemnly points out the packaging on genuine Hengshun Zhenjiang vinegar.
“And of course,” she says, “you can always tell when a bottle is a fake. Fake vinegar is not fermented, so when you shake it, it will not foam up.” Holding a bottle of real vinegar in one hand and a bottle of fake vinegar in the other, she briskly shakes both at the same time. “See?” she says. “See the difference?”
2.
Matilda Ho, founder of Bits x Bites, shakes my hand firmly and has precisely thirty minutes to talk. She has carefully drawn eyeliner and is carrying a MacBook Air in one arm. She speaks rapidly. Our conversation on food security and food safety unfolds over these thirty minutes at the Bits x Bites office in Shanghai, with a glass door so clean and transparent that I walked into it on my way to meet her.
Founded in China, Bits x Bites is the world’s first venture capital fund dedicated to food innovation. Its mission is to “shape the future of good food,” providing both investment returns and social benefit. The portfolio of Bits x Bites companies ranges from meal kits to lab-grown meat to “weather-proof farms” that provide a hermetic seal against the outside world of climate change; it also includes some gene-editing startups. In addition to Bits x Bites, Matilda is also the founder of Yimishiji, an online organic farmers market focused on the Shanghai-area “foodshed,” a term used to describe the geographic area that grows and transports food for a particular population. A small village that relies on subsistence farming has a tiny, local foodshed, while certain upper-class consumers in Shanghai have a global foodshed.
The Yimishiji app is filled with images of beautiful produce. Sunlit eggs, streamlined stalks of celery, a lone bright orange carrot that seems to say demurely, I am luxury, you want me. Compared to the chaotic, open-air wet markets that most of China has traditionally shopped at, filled with slabs of fresh meat dangling on hooks, tanks of live seafood, and colossal piles of produce sold under tents, Yimishiji is a sharp break, catering to China’s up-and-coming urban middle class. And unlike the food at China’s open-air markets, all the items on Yimishiji have been independently tested for food safety. On Yimishiji, there are no bottles of fake vinegar. There are not even mass-produced products like Hengshun Zhenjiang vinegar.
Fake vinegar is the least of China’s food-safety woes. A deliberately tongue-in-cheek headline from the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post reads: FIRM USES HUMAN HAIR IN SOY SAUCE “BREAKTHROUGH.” The article reveals that ground-up human hair was being put in soy sauce, cutting production costs by half. Profiteers diluted the original sauce with hair, then put the doctored soy sauce back in empty brand-name bottles and onto supermarket shelves.
Other unsavory cost-cutting techniques include making tapioca bubble tea balls with plastic green peas and using inedible red dyes on chilies. “Gutter oil,” a type of recycled oil, is rampant, since cooking oil is a big expense, given the stir-fried nature of Chinese cuisine. Gutter oil entrepreneurs collect the massive amount of restaurant waste that is produced by millions of people eating out every night. They then filter and extract the oil back out of the waste, reselling the recycled oil to restaurants and supermarkets.
Food-safety incidents can be fatal. In 2008, before the Beijing Olympics, several infants in China died from kidney stones, and thousands more were suddenly sick, in critical condition. Investigators quickly traced the cause back to infant formula produced by Sanlu, a dairy company. The formula had been mixed with melamine. Melamine is similar in appearance to milk and boosts protein content. Often used in cattle feed, it is toxic to humans above certain doses. In order to increase profits and yield, farmers producing dairy for Sanlu had added melamine to their milk. The amount of melamine in Sanlu’s infant formula exceeded the United Nations’ food standard threshold for melamine in infant formula, with lethal results.
Existing food-safety scandals were just a small drop in a sea of risk. Matilda knows this all too well, with her background as a management consultant to multinational food corporations in China. As China’s middle-class numbers increase to nearly half a billion, more of the world’s population is demanding increased food choice and availability. Matilda points out that this is not a China-specific problem: middle-class consumers globally expect constant availability of a range of foods, and this lengthens the supply chain across towns, provinces, and countries, making it possible to always have strawberries at the supermarket, no matter what season it is. But with the addition of each block on the chain comes another potential source of failure.
Careful sourcing from farms is only part of the solution. Even the best products can be stymied by broken
links in the cold chain during transport. Matilda gives the example of truck drivers, who will often turn off their refrigeration in order to save gasoline money and pocket the extra cash. When you start transporting food across hundreds of kilometers, control over the transportation process decreases. And due to effects on the ultimate food safety of perishable goods, this means, for consumers, the difference between a night out on the town and a night at the hospital.
3.
Traveling back from Shanghai, I talk to the political scientist and food-safety expert John Yasuda on the phone. He’s in Oxford, England, and I’m standing on the second floor of the Shanghai Hongqiao train station, huddled in a McDonald’s, one of the few quiet spots in the sprawling building. “Food safety is a nasty problem that combines macro-political, economic questions into a problem that is lived out day-to-day,” John tells me. The more we talk, the more insurmountable food safety seems to become, given the interconnected, global span of the issue—a “wicked problem,” a new type of problem whose name Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber coined to describe the increasingly entangled, global nature of related challenges.
Food safety is crucial for political stability, and is ultimately a reflection on a country’s governance. For a long time, China’s food woes were exacerbated by political corruption and bribery. In 2013, Xi Jinping made it a priority to address agriculture and food safety in China, remarking, “If our party can’t even handle food-safety issues properly, then people will ask whether we are fit to keep ruling China.”