Blockchain Chicken Farm

by Xiaowei Wang

  In person, Naomi is down-to-earth and just as energetic as in her videos. She’s taller than I expected. Her humility is startling—even though she has hundreds of videos with numerous original projects, she still refers to herself as a DIY tech enthusiast.

  And I am struck by her relationship to machines, and to her own body. In the same way hardware can have different enclosures, she says, she sees her own body as an enclosure. She performs body modification because she believes “you have to give the computer what it wants.” She anticipates a world of computer vision algorithms on video platforms that increase rankings based on the content of the video, with platforms placing “attractive women” first in search results. Naomi wants to show up first. In an ideal universe, she says, she would have a shop at Huaqiangbei, the famed electronics market of Shenzhen, known as “the market of the future.” She would sell body parts, just like computer cases. Want a better arm? Ask her. A different set of eyes? She’s got the hookup.

  Sitting with Naomi in the Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, a makerspace full of soldering irons and electrical wires, there’s a clear irony. Naomi grew up in Shenzhen. And while many of her classmates, the women she grew up with, now solder in factories, Naomi is soldering in internet videos. While her classmates are seen as mindless drones, she’s heralded as a forward-thinking, DIY “maker,” part of a broader hacker movement that emphasizes innovation and STEM education.

  For a long time, Shenzhen was where so many of America’s most innovative products were built, and these products were made by the women Naomi grew up with. It is also the place that popularized shanzhai—originally a derogatory Cantonese term for knockoffs or pirated goods. The word “shanzhai,” directly translated, means “mountain stronghold”—since people from rural mountain villages couldn’t afford real Louis Vuitton or officially produced DVDs of Friends, the shanzhai versions came from low-end, poorly run pirate factories. These shanzhai products remain proof to the West that China cannot innovate, it can only copy.

  David Li, the founder of Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, along with the scholar Silvia Lindtner, is bringing this idea of shanzhai as imitation into question. They have been researching the innovation ecosystem for the past few years, and they propose the term “new shanzhai.” David explained to me that part of the original shanzhai economy began with copying DVDs. Since copied DVDs couldn’t be played by brand-name players, a whole set of products were created to support the copied DVDs. From there, a wildly creative ecosystem appeared.

  New shanzhai is open source on hyperspeed, an unapologetic confrontation with Western ideas of intellectual property. The designers and engineers of new shanzhai products build on each other’s work, co-opting, repurposing, and remixing in a decentralized way. At Huaqiangbei electronics market, where Naomi wants her body-parts stall, companies compete and cooperate with one another in a fast-paced dance. Wandering through the stalls of the market, you’ll find everything imaginable for sale, and many things you never imagined: holograph generators, 3D printers, karaoke mics with speakers built in, laser cutters, simple cell phones with modular, replaceable parts that require little equipment to open and repair (the opposite of an iPhone).

  Shanzhai’s past has connotations of knockoff iPhones. New shanzhai stands in stark contrast to the increasingly proprietary nature of American technology, pushing us to think about access, maintenance, and the conflation of intellectual property and civility. After all, intellectual property rights are not intrinsic. They were created in eighteenth-century England, and tied into the idea of ownership as defining existence—the right to own as the right to be human.3 And in a time when American corporations are threatening university students researching new technologies with patent lawsuits, shanzhai feels more urgent than ever.

  Outside the well-funded confines of places like Silicon Valley, for the rest of the world that can’t afford US$400 3D-modeling software or US$300 phones that can be repaired only by experts, shanzhai is desperately needed. How can you even begin to innovate if you can’t afford the tools needed for innovation?

  Shanzhai holds the power to decolonize technology. For so long, technology expertise was held by a small circle, a technical elite. “Technology transfer” is the process that many development experts describe, the seeding of tech products, software, assistance, and advice from the metropolitan United States to places like China, Kenya, and even rural America. These projects have had mixed success, often leaving communities dependent on proprietary technology. But in order for technology absorption to happen, such places need the ecosystem, tools, and knowledge to begin to create their own products, tailored to their contexts. Shanzhai pushes the boundaries of what we currently think of as innovation and argues for the right not only to use a device or software but also to collaboratively alter, change, and reclaim it—a shanzhai economy instead of an innovation economy.

  6.

  Four hours outside of Guangzhou, in Yangguang village, a group of farmers have formed an organic rice cooperative. The process is not only a shanzhai economy in action, but also points to the ways shanzhai practices can build a startlingly different world.

  The members of Rice Harmony Cooperative pick me up from the long-distance bus station in the nearest town. This part of Guangdong Province is peaceful, the bus station still a single hall. A woman stands looking bored near a defunct X-ray machine. At this bus station, strangely, there’s no scanning of personal ID to even enter the station—people leisurely come and go.

  We drive to a nearby town for lunch. The restaurant is simple, with battered wooden tables and a glass lazy Susan in the middle. The food is delicious: bright green stir-fried snap peas and preserved pork, vegetable-stuffed tofu, and chewy, perfectly cooked rice. The group’s surliest, oldest member, Farmer Qiu, is sixty and an experienced rice farmer. Another, Xinghai, is thirty-three years old, and after years of living and working as a migrant laborer in Guangzhou, he’s back in Yangguang village.

  Rice in Guangdong has a bad reputation. In 2007, it was discovered that 70 percent of Guangdong rice had unexpectedly high cadmium levels, due to fertilizer overuse. Yangguang village’s soil was fortunately unaffected. Still, a few years ago Farmer Qiu sensed that something else was wrong with the soil—it had become hardened and compact, vastly different from the soil he knew from childhood.

  Rice farming is a labor-intensive art. Some regions in China rely on methods that are ancient. The rice-fish-duck system, for example, is a dynamic living system that requires no chemical fertilizers or pesticides. The system uses fish that live in the flooded paddies eating insects as a natural insect repellent. Ducks also live in the paddies, providing fertilizer and an added repellent, against snails. During harvest season, the paddies are drained and the fish are easily caught and preserved in wine. The ducks live on for the next season. Paddies are also often small, given the geography of the mountainous rice-growing regions in southern China. Mechanization is difficult.

  Rice Harmony’s form of organic rice farming ensures that the fate of one person is tied to everyone else’s. In Yangguang rice terraces, water moves through ancient paddies from the top of the mountain slowly down to the lowest terraces, in a form of natural irrigation. Every five years, farmers switch paddies through a lottery system, ensuring that no family is stuck with a paddy in a lower or higher region forever. No one has contiguous paddies from this random lottery system, making irrigation a space of constant negotiation. If your paddy is at the top of the mountain and you use up all the water by building a dam, you risk blocking water to your own paddy somewhere else, and also other families’. If you use pesticides in your paddy, residue will flow down into other paddies.

  Any change in one rice paddy affects another. Even spraying weeds along the sides of paddies can affect the testing of a neighbor’s site. Village meetings happen on account of this pesticide-free, organic rice-farming system. Xinghai shows me pictures from a recent meeting where farmers sat together, debating what to do about all the
weeds, taking votes, estimating their yield and harvest for the season. As a cooperative, they all have a fiscal stake in the venture.

  Membership in the Rice Harmony Cooperative has been growing every year, and this is no small feat in modern China, where individualism is increasing and the memory of previously disastrous attempts at collectivization by the government remains. Yet the cooperative structure centers the community as the locus of decision-making, creating a collective investment that is resilient under the strain of strong personalities and politics. This is not an easy process to navigate, with cooperative members needing to resolve conflict rather than walk away from it. As a shanzhai endeavor, actions cannot be singular and individual. Xinghai and Qiu spend planting seasons in their own fields, and alongside other farmers, providing technical advice and negotiating interpersonal conflict.

  Small customized agricultural machines that lift and turn the soil in a special motion are shared among cooperative members. These machines have been built by Qiu and Xinghai, who worked with local blacksmiths to dice up existing machines, creating new blades and attachments. In front of the Rice Harmony lending library are two of these Frankenstein machines.

  While Rice Harmony makes its own machines, and uses a range of social media and platforms to sell its rice, people, not technology, stand firmly at the helm of decision-making. It’s also an open process—during harvest seasons, Rice Harmony encourages visitors from all over the world to come to learn about organic farming. This type of farming, like any system, is not without its critics, who argue that it can’t scale up, it can’t create enough yield, that it’s not scientific like more engineered, industrial practices. Unsurprisingly, it is the local government that pushes scientific, rational forms of management, including the use of pesticides and fertilizers. Yet for all the debate on process, in Yangguang village, this farming is working.

  Rice Harmony serves as a reminder of the humility in innovation, its ability to renew, to change political and social structures. Innovation is literally an ecosystem for Rice Harmony—an ecosystem that does not scale across thousands or millions of users but across the spectrum of time instead, regenerating the soil and community ties from one planting season to the next. For that, you don’t need VC funding, a legion of engineers, or millions of users.

  I wander through the paddies, past the Frankenstein machines, past the piles of rice straw used as organic fertilizer. If innovation casts the spell of capitalism, in this mountain stronghold, I see shanzhai as a verb, used to cast a different kind of spell. To shanzhai. To turn protocols into practices that bind us together rather than centralize authority. To turn back the worship of scale and renew our commitments to care. I think back to the words I heard when I was a kid, the other magical phrase, Made in China, and the dismissive tone in the man’s voice. Barometers of success and innovation are invented by those with money, turning engagement into the surface-level interactions of informed users, rather than the deeper actions that tackle structural, social change by invested citizens willing to hold long village meetings. Entire entrepreneurship programs exist, funded by VCs, designed to foster what VCs see as the core values of innovation. Instead of continuing to accept success and innovation as empty containers, I propose new measures, understanding our world through shanzhai, through the ability to care, maintain, renew, and deepen commitments.

  I walk by a woman balancing a bucket on her head, off to feed chickens that help control pests. She whistles on her way up a mountain. A whole socioeconomic ecosystem stems from the technical farming infrastructure in this village. It makes me wonder what the parallel might be for our network infrastructure. And as scary as it might sound, to shanzhai the world will take time, as we confront our definitions of rationality, as we question intellectual property and what it means to exist meaningfully without boundaries of individual ownership. To shanzhai means we give up parts of our ego, rather than innovating a quick fix that scales to millions. After all, money and seed funds are finite, but time is long and ever passing, leaving us with more questions than answers.

  6

  “No One Can Predict the Future”

  1.

  The police station in Guiyang is loud. The police officers are rowdy, joking and drinking tea while one of them manages to take a nap behind the reception desk. There’s a constant stream of people walking in and out, the scent of hot dogs and canned meat wafting through the hallway. Fluorescent lights beam across formerly white tiles, now muddy from Guiyang’s incessant construction. At one point, a haggard man in a leather jacket walks downstairs, smelling strongly of body odor and urine, looking confused and disoriented. No one pays him any attention. An ashen whiteboard on wheels sits hastily wedged in the stairwell on the first floor, displaying a list: “Drug cases” says the heading, with five names scrawled in faded marker.

  My host, a police officer named Xiaoli, apologizes for the scene—he explains that it is usually like this; they have a lot going on, and it’s probably not like the nice, clean police stations I’m used to in the coastal cities of Beijing and Guangzhou. Xiaoli has been touted by media outlets as the handsome millennial police officer of Guiyang, technologically savvy and ready to change how policing is done in the city. I’m meeting with him about the city’s Shi You Ren Kou Ping Tai (实有人口平台), or Real Population Platform, which is supposed to be a massive compendium of data on citizens in parts of Guiyang.

  The Real Population Platform is one of the products made by Huacheng Technology Company. The platform makes hefty promises of what the company terms “total population control.” Biometric data from face scans, state-issued personal identification numbers, fingerprints, and criminal records all come together on the Real Population Platform. Similar platforms have been rolled out across other cities, from Shanghai to Liaoning, although the rollout is highly fragmented across provinces: some places have more success than others.

  The focus of Guiyang’s “total population control” is not the entire city population but the urban villages (chengzhongcun, 城中村). These areas of the city exist as remarkable and unavoidable reminders of China’s urbanization project, and the never-ending process of building (and rebuilding). They thrive freely in big cities until the city government decides to eradicate them. During the winter of 2009, while Beijing’s urban villages still existed, I visited one that was adjacent to Yuan Ming Yuan, or the Old Summer Palace. It teemed with life, and poverty—kids playing badminton in the streets, piles of trash, stray dogs sniffing around, and hunks of meat hung to cure outside the entrance of a public restroom by someone taking advantage of scarce outdoor space. It was a rare affordable haven for migrants to the city who could not pay Beijing’s astronomical rents.

  Urban villages help alleviate the housing burden on new migrants, yet they are disappearing in a phenomenon not specific to China—the push toward “making places nicer and safer.” Chengzhongcun directly translated means “village within the city,” and these form as Chinese cities expand into or start to surround neighboring farmland. Eventually, the land is cleared for new skyscrapers, and the government compensates the farmers with housing and money. In the best scenario, peasants can become well-off landlords in the new cityscape. In the worst case, they end up with compensation so low that they cannot buy a new home.

  Like China’s food and language, urban villages have an enormous amount of regional variation. What is common across all urban villages is that they are home to those on the fringes of city life—nannies, housekeepers, construction workers, delivery drivers. In Shenzhen, urban villages have played a key part in the city’s rise, nurturing new inventors with brash ideas and informal economies. Yet because of the socioeconomic status of the population residing in urban villages, these areas are deemed dangerous by upper-middle-class urbanites. The term that upper-middle-class Chinese people use to describe this population is “low-quality” (disuzhi, 低素质). Strangely, the upper-middle class seems to have no qualms about the low-quality population travelin
g to wealthier parts, watching over their children and cleaning their homes.

  Guiyang’s status as a tech boomtown is amplified by its dreamy, sci-fi landscape. The highway is only ten years old, but already vines and eucalyptus have crept through underpasses, covering entrance ramps. Tunnels and bridges tumble through the city, layering cars and people on top of buildings and mountains. The explosive economic growth has led to a number of urban villages forming throughout its rickety, twisting streets. Xiaoli’s office is on the second floor of the police station, looking out onto the urban village it’s responsible for. Blue construction barriers line the streets, dividing half-formed sidewalks and rubble from the bustle of people, scooters, cars, and bicycles. The streets and the houses are coated with a layer of mud.

  Xiaoli and I are the same age—something we immediately bond over. “We’re both born after 1980, so let’s just be direct with each other, none of that official-style speech,” he says, referring to the way most politicians in China talk on-screen: with a robotic air to maintain authority. He trained in the police academy after receiving his undergraduate degree in sociology. Guizhou born and raised, he decided to stick around his home province. A number of years ago, he married, and now he and his wife have a five-year-old daughter.

  Even though Xiaoli and I are similar in age, it’s hard to unlearn my training from all my childhood textbooks and songs: I feel like I should call him Uncle Policeman, an endearing title of respect for authority (jinchashushu, 警察叔叔).

  The Chinese police system is complex and used to be much more fragmented across cities and provinces, with little national or centralized information. For example, a person from Shandong that I met along my travels had a criminal record of minor offenses: theft, fighting when drunk. He traveled around China freely, but it wasn’t until he tried to go to Beijing in 2018 that police prevented him from entering the city, afraid he’d run amok in the country’s political capital.