by Xiaowei Wang
The party’s priority on food safety for political stability is manifested in its censorship of food-safety scandals.1 After all, the numbers would cause government officials to lose face, undermining their authority. Compared to countries like Mexico and Turkey, which have similar GDPs per capita, China’s food-safety index rating is significantly lower. Compared to countries like Singapore, with similarly authoritarian governments, China’s food-safety score is shockingly low.
Why is China so bad at food safety? John elaborates on the problems of scale that Matilda mentioned. Feeding 22 percent of the world’s population on 7 percent of the world’s arable land is just plain difficult. Complicating this task are the demands on China’s smallholder farmers. Nearly 98 percent of Chinese farmers have land that is less than the size of two football fields. There is enormous pressure on these farmers to produce enough food for the nation, ensuring food security. “The food bowl of the Chinese people must always remain firmly in their own hands,”2 remarked Xi Jinping during his first few months as president in 2013. These farmers have additional pressure to produce enough food for export, which comprises 10 percent of China’s massive GDP, alongside humanitarian relief food, crucial to China’s bid as a global leader. And despite the amount of control the national government appears to have, the governance of food safety in China is fairly decentralized, with the bulk of the responsibility on province- and county-level agricultural bureaus.
Although centralization and consolidation seem like they might be the answer, industrialized agriculture would only displace farmers. As John points out, land in China is a precious resource, especially as China urbanizes and threatens the red line, an agricultural “defense line.” Most of all, the land allocated to farmers serves as a basic form of poverty alleviation—no matter how poor you are, you can always go back to the land and farm food for yourself and your family. Privatizing land would only reproduce social inequality, John says, and that would threaten political stability.
Ultimately, food safety revolves around social trust, and John thinks that “social trust can’t scale.” When supply chains were shorter, being able to meet your farmer created this trust. With supply chains now long and complex, the chance you might meet the Australian farmer who grew the kiwi you eat or the Mexican farmer who produced the avocado on your plate is low. Farmers themselves are also isolated from seeing the people they provide food for; they send their products off to larger corporations that then redistribute them. These corporations demand low prices, squeezing farmers into a bind. In the case of Sanlu’s melamine scandal, farmers felt the pressure from Sanlu to stretch their product to the point where it became lethal. This pressure to keep prices low increases with scale: the difference of a penny means a lot more when it’s multiplied by millions of gallons of milk.
As John says this, I think of a common refrain I hear in China: “The West doesn’t understand our problems. We just have too many people. The government has to operate at a scale you can’t even imagine.”
Staring out over the Shanghai Hongqiao train station, I watch as crowds of people line up, pushing each other through ticket gates, for sold-out high-speed trains that leave every five minutes. I wonder if it’s all actually true.
That’s the thing about trust. We live in a time when, through networks built using technology, there are more connections in the world. Can trust be easily extended? In the past, your network was small; you ate food produced by your local foodshed. Now, in cities, you rely on a much bigger network to put food on your plate.
In this light, the age-old argument for government can seem appealing: some kind of structure has to exist to mediate trust, to control the masses, the workers and farmers. The Chinese government is continuing its battle for food safety, with the same opacity it has always operated under. It’s pursuing a variety of tactics, from increased involvement at the local level to using high-tech measures like blockchain in the newly formed Food Safety Cloud (食品安全云), to prevent record falsification at all points in the chain, whether at the local or the provincial scale.3 The question is, will a large, lumbering government truly manage to help scale up social trust, given the mistrust people have toward the government already, after all the food-safety scandals? And if these initiatives operate as closed systems between the government and the corporations that make this technology, how can they regain the public’s trust?
4.
On a humid summer day in the city of Guangzhou, I head to Alibaba’s brand-new Hema supermarket with my uncle. Outside the supermarket is Hema’s mascot, a giant hippopotamus in Alibaba blue. Its rotund snout takes up most of its face, leading to some peach emoji jokes online.
Hema supermarket is clean and precise, an off-line version of Yimishiji but with distinct differences: unlike the seasonal, local, organic foods that Yimishiji has, Hema has a vast selection of foods from any season, from any part of the world. Vacuum-sealed slabs of Norwegian farmed salmon from a special Alibaba–Norwegian Seafood Council partnership, raspberries from the United States, hunks of pork from Fujian, cherries from New Zealand, and soup dumplings from Shanghai all sit neatly under soothing lighting. All the food at Hema is guaranteed to be fresh, high quality, and most of all safe.
Shopping at Hema is not cheap, but that’s what Alibaba and other tech companies are betting on. Over the past few years, tech companies including Alibaba, JD.com, and NetEase are all making forays into the food and food-retailing space, leveraging tight control over all degrees of the chain. These companies are centralizing production and shipping, with the help of informatics and sensors, giving consumers a sense of control over their food. This becomes apparent throughout the Hema store, as the prepackaged produce states the day of the week it was received in-store and the exact farm it came from.
As we wander through the aisles, my uncle stops in the seafood section. Seafood is a luxury in China, a luxury that more and more people can now afford. Live fish in tanks, paddling shrimp, and lobsters lumbering in crowded bins sit in the section, like a zoo exhibit. Chinese cuisine and eating habits demand fresh seafood, never frozen, killed the day of cooking.
Rather than trusting the government, people have shifted their trust to the private sector: Hema, Alibaba. This leads to cascading, glaring contradictions. The problems of food safety are the result of a privatized, free market model of agriculture with global reach—where competitive market behavior drives cost cutting. The government serves as a way to mediate social trust, to regulate and protect its citizens. Along the way, the government has struggled to be effective, which has conveniently led private companies to compete in the free market for a monopoly on food safety. Business articles laud Hema and other tech-company supermarkets as innovators digging into food safety: the same set of market forces that created the problem is now purportedly coming to the rescue.
For tonight, my aunt has requested we pick up several pounds of live shrimp. A few of them are at one end of the tank, reminding me of an aquarium display. Most are in the center, zooming around. My uncle sticks a net into the water, and some manage to flee. He pours dozens of swimming, frenzied shrimp into a big plastic bag, and places it in our cart. I stare as they dart back and forth, knocking into each other, beady black eyes protruding on stalks from the sides of their body. At this scale, a mass of shrimp seems more like a sinister invasion of insects than a tempting dinner.
5.
Chongqing is a sprawling, messy, mountainous city. The day I arrive, the air pollution is so thick it has blotted out the sun, casting a haze that turns the sky orange with a hint of gray. It looks like an apocalyptic-movie scene, as if the next rainstorm might topple the city. The “horizontal skyscraper” by the architect Moshe Safdie is almost finished. It’s a long building that sits perilously atop three other skyscrapers, spanning several city blocks.
Through tunnels and over highways perched on mountains, my bus travels to Nanchuan District, two hours from the center of Chongqing. Another two hours and Chongqing’
s haze has been left behind. The bus goes through newly constructed tunnels, lights fresh and bright, untarnished, no buildup of dust from exhaust fumes.
I arrive in Sanqiao village, in the green mountains of Guizhou, where the blockchain chicken roams.
The village has a single paved road. The bus stop is next to a small store, and faces a large hill. I ask several people who are walking along the single road for directions to the village government headquarters. Sometimes the person does not understand me and I cannot understand them. In China’s vast geography, each region has its own unique spoken dialect. Dialects can be so strong that fluent Mandarin speakers from elsewhere will not understand what a local person is saying. I can recall one visit to my mother’s ancestral home when a cousin had to translate for me throughout the entire dinner.
This area of Guizhou has its own dialect as well as its own distinct language, given that it is home to the Miao ethnic minority. It’s also one of the poorest regions in China, with an average household income of RMB 5,000 (about US$700) a year.
Sanqiao is dreamlike, with mountains covered in fog. I walk along a river with a small white bridge spanning a steep ravine. The village government headquarters stands on another daunting hill, past a battered-looking elementary school painted pink. I can hear the high pitch of children’s voices reciting a poem.
A large red sign across from the newly constructed hospital reads BEING LAZY IS A DISGRACE, BEING SELF-RELIANT LEADS TO STRENGTH (好吃懒惰不光彩, 自力更生才出彩). It’s one of the many political slogans that are part of the government’s poverty-alleviation policy, and eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Hustle hard. Underneath the large red sign is a woman at a desolate fruit stand rearranging the oranges in her crate over and over. Hustle has come to Sanqiao.
6.
Blockchain chicken is not the actual name of the chicken I am here to see. The official name is Bubuji (步步鸡), or GoGoChicken, as some English PR materials call it. The COO of Shanghai Lianmo Technology, the company behind blockchain chicken, says that he explicitly keeps “blockchain” out of the name. To him, overhyped blockchain projects have turned the term “blockchain” into marketing gloss.
These blockchain chickens sell for up to RMB 300 (US$40) on JD.com. Typical buyers are upper-class urbanites—people willing to pay a premium on food.
I meet with one of the village secretary’s fresh-faced assistants, Ren. He grew up in the county. He’s thirty years old, and unlike many of his peers, he returned home after college in Chongqing, to help his ailing parents. He joined the local government because he figured if he had to come home, he might as well try to make the place he lived in a little less impoverished, a little more wealthy, and ultimately a little more lively.
We head to the GoGoChicken farm. As meat consumption increases in China, even places like KFC and McDonald’s are subject to food-safety issues. Enter blockchain, the exotic technology that will address tracking and provenance, especially in chickens.
Ren tells me that, funnily enough, there’ve been a lot of GoGoChicken stories in the news, but very few visits to the farm. When we do get to the farm, I’m surprised by how friendly it looks. The entrance is small and peaceful, with brightly painted cartoon chickens on the walls.
Farmer Jiang is in charge of this blockchain chicken operation. He’s wearing a straw hat in the rain. Behind him is a colorful mural of a chicken farmer with the same straw hat and chickens clustered around him. He’s just plain nice.
Farmer Jiang has been raising chickens for a long time, long before blockchain was a technology. His specialty has always been linxiaji (under-the-tree chickens, 林夏季). They are free-range, vegetarian-fed chickens, the kind that roam around Sanqiao’s lush canopy, getting plenty of exercise. Typical overstuffed chickens on industrial poultry farms are fed constantly in order to reach the correct weight for slaughter in under one month. These free-range blockchain chickens are raised for at least three months before slaughter. As Farmer Jiang describes the chickens’ diet of local corn, my mouth starts watering at how delicious their eggs must be.
The GoGoChicken project is a partnership between the village government and Lianmo Technology, a company that applies blockchain to physical objects, with a focus on provenance use cases—that is, tracking where something originates from. When falsified records and sprawling supply chains lead to issues of contamination and food safety, blockchain seems like a clear, logical solution.
That is one of the many promises of blockchain. In its origins, blockchain was structured with a set of assumptions about the social conditions under which it operates, and many of its advocates and engineers have pushed a political vision of the world that is somewhere between libertarianism and anarchy. But like a lot of technology these days, it has been adopted by companies and governments to make money, including a chicken farm in a small remote village of Guizhou.
Farmer Jiang says that raising free-range chickens is a yearly uphill battle. One set of problems was the threat of disease, and the material difficulties of making sure several thousand chickens survived over three months.
“Chickens aren’t very smart,” Farmer Jiang says as we walk around the farm, into a neatly kept feeding barn. “Or brave. If you have them outside of cages, at night they can get scared. They cluster around lights and they overcrowd each other, killing each other. A kind of chicken stampede.”
The bigger problem was that Jiang didn’t have a reliable market every year. He had to do all the selling and marketing himself. Even when he did make a sale, the profit margin was low or he sold at a loss. Buyers had a difficult time trusting him, and trusting that the chickens were indeed free-range, worth the higher asking price.
Then Zhou Ling arrived from Shanghai, to serve as the Sanqiao village aid cadre. China’s poverty-alleviation efforts deploy millions of aid cadres across China, typically younger members of the party, who provide all kinds of assistance and relief, including repairing water pumps and conducting digital literacy initiatives. These poverty-alleviation programs reflect China’s “fragmented authoritarianism,” which is both decentralized and autocratic: decentralized at the local scale with fairly loose controls, but authoritarian on national policies.4 The contradiction of this fragmented-authoritarian model can create a lot of confusion between the official policy and what is actually happening on the ground.
Zhou connected Farmer Jiang with Lianmo Technology, which was hoping to pilot more blockchain and Internet of Things projects, including the profitable business of poultry tracking, as China consumes five billion chickens a year (which is still only about half the American chicken-consumption rate of nine billion per year).
Jiang shows us around the rest of the farm—several pristine feeding areas, and the “control” room where the base station sits. Each chicken wears an ankle bracelet that is physically tamperproof, which tracks characteristics such as number of steps taken and the location of the chicken. A chicken Fitbit of sorts.
The front plate of the ankle bracelet has a QR code on it. All this data is viewable on a website accessible with a password, and the website includes constantly streaming surveillance footage of the chickens to ensure that they have not been adulterated in any way by an intruder. There’s also a map of the chickens’ movements. Data about the chickens is uploaded via the base station to Anlink, a proprietary enterprise blockchain that is an experiment by the sprawling ZhongAn, an online-only insurance company.
Sanqiao chickens are under heavy surveillance. In addition to wearing the ankle bracelets, the chickens are tested every two weeks by the local branch of the Ministry of Agriculture for any signs of antibiotic usage, which is illegal under the category of free-range. While it may seem like overkill, it might be a small price to pay in order to win back public trust.
These chickens are delivered to consumers’ doors, butchered and vacuum sealed, with the ankle bracelet still attached, so customers can scan
the QR code before preparing the chicken. Scanning this code leads them to a page with details about the chicken’s life, including its weight, the number of steps it took, and its photograph. In Shanghai, these details are seen as a sign of authenticity and food safety, while in the United States they could easily be read from an animal-welfare angle. Farmer Jiang lets me scan an ankle bracelet, and the experience is underwhelming. While I know this is actual information about the chicken, it would be easy for Lianmo Technology to create a series of fake web pages for these chickens. Since the Anlink blockchain is an enterprise blockchain, consumers have little interaction with that part of the technology.
The village secretary’s assistant, Ren, and I head back to Jiang’s house for tea. It’s a humble home with three rooms. In one corner of the living room is a stove with a large metal top—it functions as a table, stove, and hearth for Guizhou’s chilly winters. Jiang’s mother is there, along with his wife. A flat-screen TV is behind him—the product of blockchain chicken earnings from last year.
In the end, Jiang sold six thousand chickens through the blockchain project. And as part of the communal nature of village life, several other local families were employed by the project. In a poverty-alleviation effort, profits were redistributed between Farmer Jiang’s family and the three hundred other households in the village.
Despite its success, the future of blockchain chicken is uncertain. Neither the code, nor the equipment, nor the software belongs to Jiang: it ultimately remains Lianmo Technology’s. Jiang tells me that last year, Lianmo Technology’s GoGoChicken project ordered six thousand chickens in advance, to sell off to JD.com’s online supermarket and other platforms. There was no such order this year, so Jiang is left on his own. Ren’s boss, the village’s party secretary, Chairman Chen, is currently in talks with a company to provide chickens to nearby Chongqing. As with a lot of startups, uncertainty swirls around how the technical infrastructure will continue to function, and whether Lianmo Technology will continue to support a project with such high overhead costs.