by Xiaowei Wang
The one time the farm service teams and drone operators stay silent is when the CTO announces that they are working on a simplified drone navigation system, so that the farmers themselves can fly the drones instead of relying on technical teams. Operators have a look of concern about the future of their own jobs. The CTO seems to have anticipated this and assures everyone that this is actually good news for the drone operators. When farmers become drone operators, drone operators can then move on to more high-level tasks, like data management, mapping, and business strategy. Along the rungs of drone life, everyone can expect to move up and advance, year by year.
I ask Sun Wei his opinion about the equalizing effects of technology, if a technical position like his is liberating and will allow him to do anything he wants in the future. These equalizing effects are pervasive throughout the technology and development world, the stories of “technology transforming lives” tiresome in their ubiquity. Projects like the failed One Laptop per Child, by Nicholas Negroponte, or the Hole in the Wall project exude this techno-optimistic belief—if you can give a laptop to a child or put a computer in an Indian slum, children will teach themselves linear algebra and become the next Bill Gates. We now know this is a myth inflated by a hype cycle. A whole support system of teachers, peers, and family is a stronger influence than a laptop or computer screen. But part of me—the American part of me—wants to believe the narrative about individualistic passion overcoming everything, including a lack of formal schooling or connections.
Sun Wei grins at my question and gives me a pitying look. He says, “Of course not. I have old teammates that went to Beida and unlike us diaosi [literally “pubic hair,” slang for loser], they’re off getting big promotions and roles with more responsibility. They have good backgrounds, they studied engineering. I just studied drone flying.”
Wei’s story might become increasingly common, though. One focus of recent government policy is to decrease the gap between rural and urban schools by using a wide variety of methods, including livestreaming classes, increased off-line vocational education, and massive online open courses. Some of these online education initiatives are private, sponsored by companies including Alibaba and NetEase, and others are experiments in public education. XAG itself is partnering with Zhonghang Future (中航未来教育集团) to roll out a massive virtual online flight school as well as a hundred thousand physical flight schools across the country. By the end of 2018, more than twenty thousand people had finished the online training portion through WeChat. And if XAG does intend for existing farmers to become drone operators, and for existing drone operators to become geographic information data managers, will these internet-enabled, distance-learning initiatives work? Will they be more successful than previous models of development through technology?
3.
The city of Chengdu in Sichuan Province might be known to Americans for its spicy food and pandas, but in China, Chengdu is known for its Number 7 High School. Chengdu Number 7 High School is famous for its academic performance. It’s a public school that boasts a 99 percent college-entrance rate, including graduates who go on to places such as UC Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT. Some of its students are winners of international math and science contests, and have gone on to participate in the Olympics, and the school has a wide array of extracurricular activities, including a high school orchestra that has toured globally.
In the viral online article “This Screen Changes Lives,” the writer Cheng Mengchao documents a grand experiment carried out by Chengdu Number 7 High School—a decision in 2015 to livestream the school’s classes to seventy-two thousand students in poverty-stricken rural areas of Yunnan and Guangxi with the help of New Oriental Education, an edtech (educational technology) company based in Beijing.1 The initial results were dire: rural teachers tore books up in protest, resentful of being replaced by Chengdu teachers on a digital screen. Rural students would unexpectedly burst into tears of frustration, confronted with how behind they were compared to city students at the same grade level. “I didn’t know I was so bad in school, I didn’t know I was so worthless,” remarked one student.
While more than 40 percent of Americans receive some kind of education after high school, only 10 percent of rural Chinese do. Even finishing high school is rare in rural China, where the dropout rate in middle school is 50 percent, and the high school dropout rate is as high as 66 percent. These rural students face the pressure of taking a job to support their families rather than spending their time in school. Part of this also has to do with self-image: parents and students themselves often hold the belief that they’re just not “suited to studying.”
Three years after the first classes were broadcast on livestream in Chengdu, there is a glimmer of hope. The first college-entrance exam results are promising. In previous years, only two students from these rural areas went to top universities in China. After the three-year experiment, eighty-eight students were headed to Tsinghua and Peking University. One rural student received his Peking University acceptance notice while working alongside his father on a construction site.
Li Miao, a professor at Shandong University who studies rural education via livestream, emphasizes that the material conditions surrounding these rural students are still difficult to overcome. For example, many students are often late to school or miss portions of a lesson just because the school outhouse is located far away. And while cell phones, tablets, and 5G internet are common throughout rural China, these devices do not change a prevailing attitude within families that education is a privilege rather than a necessity.
4.
Why would the Chinese government put so much effort into bridging the gap between rural and urban education? Rather than its being an act of sheer benevolence, or solely an iron fist on the valve of economic growth, the reality is that those in power want to stay in power.
For a long time, rural migrants ages eighteen to forty-five headed to the city, working and receiving higher incomes than they would in their hometowns, but not enough money to tether themselves to the city—to put down roots or buy property. In several studies, young migrants said they felt deeply unwelcome in the cities they were working in. They also felt a deep sense of alienation, lacking access to the traditional markers of adulthood such as being able to afford a house or car. The choices they had, between life in the city and life back home, were limited. In 2017, the particular plight of migrants became amplified when a fire tore through a migrant-worker village in Beijing. Such migrant-worker villages are known throughout China as “urban villages.” The Beijing city government termed these migrant workers a “low-end population” that would have to be removed. The city deemed these urban villages an eyesore as an excuse to demolish the villages and displace the migrants.
This large mass of people moving back and forth from city to countryside is a potential powder keg. Young, able-bodied workers, especially young men, untethered from car or house ownership, job, or family are threats to political stability. So the government is betting on Rural Revitalization in hopes of attracting young people back to their homes, where they will be under the watchful eye of elders, or at least have some kind of attachment, some commitment to place. This “re-peasantization” process is having mixed results. Rural opportunity can’t rely solely on fiscal incentives, so a whole infrastructure of education and new types of livelihoods are being created for those who decide to return.
So far, China’s strategy of becoming the world’s largest economy has been about quantity—relying on the economics of scale and its vast population. But the reality of manufacturing is that there is always somewhere cheaper to make things. In order for China to truly reach sustainable economic success, to move more people into the middle class, it needs a populace with a higher level of education.
The head of international marketing at XAG, Anne, is thirty years old. She’s an ikebana enthusiast and could easily fit in at a tech company in San Francisco. Originally born and raised in Guangzhou, she is also a
returnee. After spending a few years abroad, studying in the U.K., she returned home to Guangzhou for the increased opportunities here.
The conference lunch at Hotel Nikko is a buffet, a lavish display of excess. It includes an abundance of meat and seafood, prepared in a myriad of ways, from braised beef and fried chicken to coarse chunks of sushi, crudely cut. The buffet lunch requires a strategy for how much you can possibly eat while getting your money’s worth. Meat and seafood rank at the top of getting the best value, fruit and vegetables at the bottom. The thought leaders and venture capitalists (VCs) at the conference are unfazed by the display of plenty, having access to luxuries at any time. I see a few of them at a corner table, sipping tea, picking at the edges of a bowl of rice, frenetically talking about business yields and the next quarter.
Anne and I are wedged into a corner of the lobby. Next to our table is a quiet Japanese journalist who casually mentions that he is going to Xinjiang next week to report on precision agriculture in the region, a tumultuous part of the country that is responsible for 84 percent of China’s cotton production—no small feat given China’s status as the world’s second-largest cotton producer. When I ask if he speaks Mandarin or Uyghur, he shakes his head, holds up his phone, and says, “Google translate.”
At our table, Anne and I talk about returning home, and where that sense of home comes from. It’s clear from the way she talks about home that the feeling of belonging somewhere is important to her. This value comes out especially when she talks about young drone pilots returning home. “Plant protection with drones is a new profession that gives rural people enough income to survive while staying in their hometown to be with their families. They are working with dignity and respect. That’s why it’s driving more and more people to return to their hometown. And we are very glad to see this happen.”
But is it enough to lure young people back to the countryside?
Buffet life is a whole other realm, far from the countryside with its small plates of food and limited choice. As we sit and eat our lunch, I watch the drone operators joke and laugh, plates piled high with emptied crab shells, shrimp heads, and fish bones. One man slaps his friend on the back, smiling and heartily saying, “See? People live the good life here in Guangzhou! Now we get to experience it!”
How to Eat Yourself
Cloud computing is a nasty business. Despite its airy name, its data centers, with their numerous computer servers, rely on massive amounts of energy and resources, making up 2 percent of the world’s electricity use. That percentage is only expected to grow with increased global traffic. A few cloud computing companies are now purchasing carbon offsets to become “greener,” although some accuse the move of fueling inequality, allowing rich developed countries to purchase their way out of their responsibility for pollution. Usually located in rural regions, data centers also use a range of rare earth minerals, which have a particularly bad reputation for the environmental impact of their mining. As a result, researchers are looking into alternative, environmentally friendly ways of storing the world’s massively growing data. In 2017, Microsoft researchers began pioneering a way to store data inside DNA, a method far more efficient than using computer servers. This recipe envisions a future in which GMO foods and DNA data storage come together. If you truly were your user data, could you eat yourself?
Ingredients for the Soy Milk
dried soybeans | 150 g
water | At least 2,000 ml, depending on how thick you like your soy milk. Add more for a thinner, less “beany” soy milk.
Ingredients for the Fritters
tofu, silken texture | approximately 400 g
mayonnaise | 120 g
cornstarch | 60 g
salt | to taste, about 11 g
oil | for frying, depending on your preference, canola/peanut, etc.
green onions | for garnish, optional, sliced finely
Tools
electric blender
fine cheesecloth
In the late 2030s, companies turned toward DNA as a far cheaper, more sustainable, more space-saving way of storing data than the previous model of cold storage on computers. A few years later, BGI Genomics based out of Shenzhen announced that in partnership with Bayer Crop Science, genetically modified crops such as soybeans and corn could now be encoded with data inside their DNA.
Farms planting GMO soybeans could now have an extra source of income. They could collaborate with large cloud storage companies to plant soybean data fields with customer data encoded inside each bean. Strict data localization laws are common throughout the world, where data must be physically kept within the country’s borders for security purposes. As a result, the Chinese Ministry of Technology and Ministry of Agriculture saw an opportunity to combine two systems of security into one: food security with data localization. Soybean reserves could also be data reserves.
Unlike cold computer storage, DNA storage has a long half-life, of five hundred years. An economically feasible method of data destruction had to be devised. Researchers came up with a solution: cloud soybeans with embedded data are sold to the public for a highly discounted price. After these beans are digested, the data becomes thoroughly obliterated, ensuring data privacy.
Soybeans are enormously versatile. While soybeans were manually ground in ancient times throughout East Asia, electric blenders are now used instead for home soy-milk making. After the soy milk is made, different kinds of tofu can also be produced from the milk, and the soybean lees (pulp) leftover from the milk-making process can be turned into delicious fritters.
Although you can choose to consume whatever data you’d like, the flavor of cloud soybeans comes from the data content. Is it a photo of yourself with a bad haircut from five years ago, or a flattering headshot from your LinkedIn profile? Or is it yesterday’s newspaper headlines? For this recipe, we suggest going with a neutral-flavored data soybean, maybe some shipping transactions on a ledger or your to-do list from a few years ago. Or, for the brave, archived personal e-mails give the fritters a complex, heavy flavor with extra-crunchy texture.
To Make the Soy Milk
To start off, sort the beans carefully. Make sure to take out any green or non-yellow soybeans—this is a sign of bit rot in the data. Put the beans in a large glass bowl and soak overnight.
The next day, drain the beans. Blend on high for several minutes. You should have a liquid with a pulpy, smoothie-like texture.
Put the contents of the blender into a large pot. Bring the soy milk mixture to a boil, then simmer for 10 minutes. Keep a close eye on the pot, as soy milk bubbles over easily! The mixture is ready when foam appears on top. Make sure that the soybean liquid is properly cooked through—that it has reached a boil and simmered for at least 10 minutes—as uncooked soybeans cause indigestion.
Now separate the liquid (milk) from the crushed soybeans. (Be careful not to burn yourself with the hot liquid!) Separate the two by placing cheesecloth over a container and pouring the contents of the pot onto the cheesecloth. One method is to place the cheesecloth over a colander, which sits on top of a container. Squeeze and strain out the solids, using a utensil to help mash and strain (so that you don’t have to use your hands). Set aside the solids.
Pour the milk back into the large pot for the second cooking. Make sure to stir frequently so that it doesn’t burn. Bring the milk to a boil and then lower to a simmer. A light skin will start to form at the top. Skim the skin off and save it—it’s a delicious, tender bean curd, and considered a delicacy!
The milk is now ready to be diluted or sweetened, according to taste.
To Make the Fritters
Mash together the leftover soybean lees with the tofu, mayonnaise, and cornstarch. Salt to taste. Shape into small balls.
In a wok, heat up enough oil that it will cover the fritters. Place the fritters into the wok and fry at medium heat until the outsides become crispy golden brown. Remove from the heat using a slotted spoon and place onto napkins. These fritters are great
with any kind of dipping sauce.
Note that fritters are just one of many possible recipes for the soybean lees! The lees is great in savory egg pancakes, mixed with rice and fried into cakes, or stewed with dates, rice, and whatever your heart desires.
5
Made in China
1.
On the windowsill of the house I’m staying at, there is a tiny toy bird. It fits in the palm of my hand, and is made out of plastic and Styrofoam, with some natural materials tacked on to it—a tail made out of wood, seeds for eyes, pieces of a pine cone turned into a regal plume. On the bottom of the bird, a small round sticker says Made in China.
Even out here, in a small Northern California town with a thousand people, the words are inescapable. I feel flushed with embarrassment as I place the bird back on the windowsill, but I keep knocking it over during the rest of my visit.