by Xiaowei Wang
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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Author’s Note
The pace of writing a book is slower than the pace of world events. This is a book about technology in China, where change happens particularly fast. Unsurprisingly, many tech companies have been complicit in state violence, persecution, and systemic racism, as well as the silencing of dissent in many regions—including Xinjiang, home to the indigenous Uyghur people. The inclusion of such companies in this book is far from an endorsement. I oppose and condemn all forms of state violence, and I encourage readers to critically engage with the work of scholars and journalists in order to understand the role that tech companies play in maintaining racial capitalism worldwide.
Introduction
This evening, I am brushing my teeth surrounded by dozens of pin-size black worms that roil and roll along white ceramic tile. A child’s socks and underwear are hung out to dry on a small rack next to the sink. It’s been raining all day. I’m in a small village in southern China, at the border of Jiangxi and Guangdong. I arrived in the village to try to understand how e-commerce has affected life here, with farmers selling goods directly to consumers, using WeChat’s robust mobile payment system. After missing the last bus back to the nearest city, I am now on an involuntary meditation retreat.
Since I’m American, my hosts have assumed I need spacious, extraordinarily comfortable conditions, which is why I’m staying at the most modern house in the village, by myself. It’s a two-story concrete building with an outhouse that has a ceramic squat toilet, just a few convenient steps away from the front door.
It’s so cold here that I can see my breath inside. There are no radiators, just a small plastic space heater that defeatedly wheezes lukewarm air. It’s the only sound I hear besides a low, watery gurgle, accompanied by the wind rattling through cracks of the window frame.
Nighttime is dense and dark here, with no streetlights and few houses, eerily emphasized by the silence of the village. My movements feel muffled and dull. I am unused to this kind of solitude, as someone who spends most of my time in cities, and I am scared—stuck in a new place with only the worms to talk to, maybe a ghost or two, replaying supernatural horror movies in my mind. Without the stimulation of light and sound, my mind turns over thoughts and stories on repeat, revisiting inconsequentially boring past moments like a mantra: Did Xinghai think I was a jerk because I didn’t say thank you earlier when he dropped me off? Did I end my e-mail to Gu in the wrong tone? What if I get stuck in this village forever? How slow would I be at harvesting rice? I get bored with my own thoughts and download a night-light app on my phone after scrolling through pages of App Store reviews.
“Why are you here?” One of my hosts, an old rice farmer, asked me this earlier. I had been traveling for days, and in my exhaustion, his question took on a more existential note. It took me a minute before I could sputter, “I’m here to see you.”
I felt the pull of rural China about three years ago, after visiting villages in Guizhou, seeing a side of China very different from the one portrayed in most forms of media. This pull was amplified by my need to challenge my own metronormativity—a portmanteau of “metropolitan” and “normative,” coined by the theorist and scholar Jack Halberstam.
Metronormativity is pervasive—it’s the normative, standard idea that somehow rural culture and rural people are backward, conservative, and intolerant, and that the only way to live with freedom is to leave the countryside for highly connected urban oases. Metronormativity fuels the notion that the internet, technology, and media literacy will somehow “save” or “educate” rural people, either by allowing them to experience the broader world, offering new livelihoods, or reducing misinformation.
For me, challenging this metronormativity is crucial. So much of the extended crises and the rise of authoritarian populism throughout the world has been a result of globalization. The urban-rural dynamic is central to globalization, with rural areas serving as the engine, the site of extractive industries from industrial agriculture to rare earth mining. I believe our ability to confront metronormativity will determine our shared future. We are intertwined across cities, villages, and national boundaries, bound by material circumstance.
I have traveled to rare earth and copper mines in Inner Mongolia, driven along dusty highways past wind turbines and data centers, visited villages where artificial intelligence training data is made, and seen empty villages where all the young people have left for electronics factory jobs in cities. Rather than seeing the way technology has shifted or produced new livelihoods in rural China, I have been humbled to see the ways rural China fuels the technology we use every day, around the world.
Questioning metronormativity means demanding something outside the strict binaries of rural versus urban, natural versus man-made, digital versus physical, and remote as disengaged versus metropolitan as connected. To question metronormativity demands a vision of living that serves life itself, and not just life in cities. Embarking on this line of questioning demanded a big change in my own core beliefs.
The dynamics of rural China are not isolated to China itself. Yet because of its geographic distance from the United States, it remains a kind of periphery. These rural peripheries, the edges of the world, hidden from view, enable our existence in cities. These areas produce everything from the cotton in the clothes we wear to the minerals that create the computers in data centers. They also produce the food we eat. It is impossible to disentangle the countryside from food—food is at the core of the dynamic between the rural and the global. As humans, we eat to survive, and our appetite for food has carved new geographies and technologies into the world. Urbanite appetites, especially, have shifted rural economies, ecologies, and societies over the past three decades.
I have a difficult time grasping the full dynamics of complex concepts like climate change, which creates economic and ecological relationships at a dizzying array of scales throughout the world. Yet agriculture and what we eat are tangible manifestations of these entangled global issues that affect all of us. According to a recent United Nations report, a third of human greenhouse gas emissions stem from industrial agricultural practices. These same industrial agriculture practices have rearranged the way rural communities live, fomenting political change around the world.
Conducting research in rural China meant that I could, selfishly, return to villages that I love being in. There was an allure to living at a pace and scale that felt comprehensible, to living in a place that felt grounded. It is easy to romanticize rural Chinese villages as idyllic scenes of nature, small and disengaged—yet many of them are sites of economies and agricultural practices that are foundational to our world. And as numerous historians, such as Robert Brenner and Sue Headlee, have shown, shifts in agriculture and rural politics were crucial for the transition into industrialization and capitalism throughout the world. In thinking through agriculture, through a sense of place and belonging
, I was influenced by the writings of bell hooks and Wendell Berry, for whom being and belonging acquire a sense of urgency—especially in a political and economic system that dislocates people from place and community. It would have been easy to attribute the loss of belonging, of place, to just technology accelerating us into the singularity of despondency. But challenging my metronormativity meant challenging these ideas of the digital world versus the physical world, and pulling back the idea that becoming a Luddite and disengaging is the only way to reclaim a sense of belonging.
“Why are you here?” I am here because looking at technology in rural China, in places that produce the technology we use, places that show how globally entangled we are with one another, allows me to confront the scarier question that technology poses: What does it mean to live, to be human right now? Looking at tech in rural China forced me to examine the ideologies that drive engineers and companies to build everything from AI farming systems and blockchain food projects to shopping sites and payment platforms. These assumptions about humans and the way the world should work are more powerful than sheer technical curiosity in driving the creation of new technologies and platforms. Embedded in these tools are their makers’ and builders’ assumptions about what humans need, and how humans should interact. It is not enough to critique these assumptions, because in simply critiquing, we remain caught in the long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess. Tech creates isolation, tech connects marginalized communities. The difficult work that we face is to live and thrive beyond binaries and assumptions, and to aid and enable others to do so. How do we begin this work?
At the age of ninety-five, five years before her death, the activist Grace Lee Boggs wrote The Next American Revolution. Published in 2010, the book sounded an alarm bell for our present condition—a time when politics was no longer politics as usual, where traditional forms of protest were not enough to induce change, and when ecological disaster wrought by unfettered material and technological growth was looming. Despite all this, she pointed to a source of hope: “the great turning.” The great turning, a term borrowed from Buddhism, refers to a growing tidal wave of people now taking the first step toward change: addressing spiritual impoverishment. “These are the times to grow our souls,” she writes. The way to respond to crisis is to practice compassion and change the cycle of suffering. We can all actively practice compassion in our own way, whether we are doctors, teachers, or businesspeople. Engineers and makers and builders of technology have this opportunity; I hope this book sparks something for you. After all, code is words made executable—we must take care in what we say. And for those of us who see code as an apocryphal text, who see technology as indeed accelerating us toward a despondent, tightly controlled world, I hope this book reaffirms the power that you hold in being human, and demonstrates ways certain technologies might actually serve open systems. To spark the great turning, we need to transform our compassion, our imagination, and our society—we cannot focus on reforming our technologies alone. Most of all, I hope that this book brings you to parts of China that you might never visit, takes you beyond a map of abstractions, a flat map made by metronormativity.
At some point on my involuntary meditation retreat, I start to panic. I have my phone, there’s 4G service, and, trying to combat the dark, I scroll Twitter, read the news, peruse my WeChat feed. Against the heaviness of the night, the oppressive immediacy of the cold and quiet, and the lurking outhouse worms, the words on the New York Times website feel far away, flimsy. My thoughts feel flimsy.
With my phone screen on, set to my new night-light app, I finally begin drifting into sleep.
In the morning, the scarce winter light starts to shine at 7:00 a.m. I wake to a different world, one that is much less scary, much less sinister than my mind had imagined, at night, in silence. I hear the sounds of ducks and chickens, a single car in the distance. After tidying up the house, I walk past rice paddies and a small stream to the main road. I stand, waiting for the bus.
1
Ghosts in the Machine
1.
Famine has its own vocabulary, a hungry language that haunts and lingers. My ninety-year-old great-uncle understands famine’s words well. When I visit him one winter, he takes me on an indulgent trip to the food court near his house, at Tianjin’s Kerry Center. He has a small, tidy pension that he spends sparingly; he never goes out to eat. Yet he says my visit is special, so I know his affection will be communicated through food, from his own memory of hunger—an endless selection of dishes await us at the mall.
We walk from his apartment. His gait is still brisk from more than seventy years of taiji practice. Along the way, we pass a skeletal skyscraper under construction, concrete guts spilling out.
“Wasn’t that under construction last time I was here, five years ago?” I ask. It’s rare for a building to be under construction for so long in contemporary China, especially in a big city like Tianjin that has been absorbed into the greater Beijing metropolis.
My great-uncle’s gaze travels up the skyscraper. “That building was put up by a real estate developer, he’s the son of a rich guy. After Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, the developer got caught and the building was confiscated. The government wanted to continue the project and finish the building. But when they looked closely at the plans, they found that the size of each apartment was completely uninhabitable. Living rooms that were smaller than four square meters, windows that faced walls … the developer never planned on having people live in there at all. So now it just stands here, half constructed.”
It’s a Tuesday, and the food court in the mall is empty, with a few other elderly people eating by themselves. There’s something casually heartbreaking about the whole scene: fluorescent lights and the occasional “Hello, welcome!” disembodied robot voice on repeat, triggered by a faulty motion sensor. A white-haired man sits at one plastic table, a cloth wallet hanging from a string around his neck, eating a bowl of noodles, slouching in a sleepy nearness to death. At another table, a woman is drinking juice, a folded napkin stuck to the plastic cup, the corners of her mouth drooping with age. On weekends, the food court is crowded with young families from nearby residential buildings, but on weekdays this court is the dominion of the old. And in contemporary China, this is a common plague, the plague of being old and lonely. As younger generations leave villages, hometowns, even the country itself to chase after careers and jobs, and the tightening noose of income inequality squeezes leisure time, the elderly are left to their own devices. This is unusual for a culture so focused on family and filial piety.
I do not know the language of famine, but under fluorescent lights at a table of spicy, numbing vegetables, dumplings, and noodles on plastic dishes, it’s clear that my great-uncle is well acquainted with it. “Eat.” He gestures. And so I eat, even though we both know that what we’re eating is essentially junk food, that there’s still food waiting for us in the refrigerator at home, that we’ve ordered too much. But it doesn’t matter, because after you have encountered famine, indulgence is being able to throw away any scrap of food.
2.
During my visit to Tianjin, I see how the landscape of urban, contemporary China can be difficult to square with its past. This tension is what so many Western writers and media draw on: the seduction of contradiction. They conjure images of modern, gleaming skyscrapers alongside ramshackle food stalls, the chaos of crowds tracked by surveillance cameras, the steam from a wok reflecting the blue light of an iPhone. While these images are true in one dimension, I dislike them just as much as I dislike certain types of books on China that compress history into simple demographic change, or economic cause and effect. Such images and forms obscure life through a dense veil of figures, playing on the symbols that already exist in your mind. A kind of numerical inhumanity takes over.
The way images of the East shape political policy in the West has p
ersisted throughout history. “When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East? We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches,” wrote Kakuzo Okakura in 1906.1 Surface images and histories are easily transformed into the ever-present anxieties about “yellow peril” that I see in the United States, and which infiltrates government policy and everyday life.
As my great-uncle stares out the window of his apartment, he unravels a different kind of history, meandering through his memories. He now lives a quiet life of routine, between morning taiji practice and occasional phone calls with an old friend. He recalls falling in love with his wife when he was a tuberculosis patient at a hospital in Beijing—she was a doctor there. He recounts his wife’s turbulent life; deemed a class enemy by the Communists, her father fled to Taiwan, and her two siblings committed suicide after becoming targets of anti-Rightist campaigns. He turns to me, profile outlined by the low winter sun, and says, “I know you’re here writing a book about Chinese technology, but the only way to understand China’s future is through its past.” What I think he means to say is that the weight of lived history is unshakable, and it will haunt you, whether you are an ordinary citizen or in the upper echelons of power. At his age, he will be talking to you in the present moment when stories from the past suddenly swell up without warning. Sometimes they are stories of jiushehui, or the old society, a common term used by the Chinese Communist Party for pre-1949 China, a weak China unable to define a future for itself.
My grandmother had her own stories of jiushehui. She described living in a village outside Tianjin as a child and the hard labor of picking river rushes to braid baskets that she sold at town markets. She remembered her mother’s tiny bound feet, how her father and other men in the village were always absent, conscripted into one war or another. The way hunger made you dizzy, seeing stars in daylight. It was this bare existence that led her family to migrate to the city of Tianjin in search of a stability that did not rely on seasons and harvests. Tianjin was still divided into parcels belonging to Western powers at the time. My great-uncle was the doorboy at a Western restaurant; pale white men and women moved past him, their dress and demeanor exuding power. Unlike so many children of that time, he not only survived famine by eating restaurant leftovers but would eventually be able to attend school, funded by my grandmother’s income as a factory girl.
