by Xiaowei Wang
The intractability of life to be rendered captive to simple numbers, lines on a record, reaffirms the powerful act of living against the weight of data used toward predictive ends. To shed the belief that data is predictive and powerful is to push away surveillance as necessity. Shedding our devotion to data gives a depth of meaning to presence, carving out new paths and ways of living beyond categorical drop-down menus, checkboxes, and forms.
The data gathered on me is cheap and meaningless, just as the data gathered on you is already meaningless after the moment has passed. My last ten purchases on my credit card do not speak to the poetry of my mornings, the slant of Californian sun at 4:00 p.m., the moment between dream and waking. In a life with specificity and intention, the power of surveillance and data becomes deflated, the industrial quality of rendering people into categories vanishes. The call to an examined life begins. There is no intrinsic value in the categorical. There is nothing to be said about bare existence that gains power through classification.
In 1952, the psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon advocated for living against the weight of history. He was writing during the beginnings of the Cold War, with World War II still a close memory. The reorganization of world powers started to shape fields of economic development and scientific management, as well as decolonization and postcolonial movements. In that time of tumult, questions of what it meant to live, and what it meant to be human, were at the forefront of many people’s minds, like Fanon’s, as they worked together to build new societies. Living against history can equally be applied to our understanding of data—“I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”6
I think back to what Xiaoli said to me: “No one can predict the future.” And Xiaoli is right. When I see my friend now, holding his chubby six-month-old against his cheek, his son’s small round toes curled, I see a joy that transcends any columns in a database, any notes on a record, any human-programmed algorithm. In the world in which we travel, our right to life hinges on our endlessly creating ourselves.
7
Gone Shopping in the Mountain Stronghold
1.
The shortest route between the tiny, thousand-year-old village of Shangdiping and the nearest town is a meandering five-kilometer walking path through mountains, rice paddies, and bamboo forest. Over the past thousand years, everything arrived to Shangdiping via this path, hauled by villagers on wooden yokes. Whether it was getting your rice dehusked or going to town for a relative’s wedding, you traveled this single mountain path. One rainy winter day, I walk along this ancient trail guided by a hand-drawn paper map, after hearing about Shangdiping from a friend who makes a yearly pilgrimage to this village.
In 2017, another route to Shangdiping was finished—a paved cement road wide enough to fit a single car and motorbike. This cement road signaled a new era for the tiny village, an era of e-commerce and development. A village of subsistence farmers would learn how to become part of the market economy.
The village is home to around nine hundred residents, all of them Dong, an ethnic minority group in China with populations also scattered across Laos and Vietnam. The Dong are known for their “intangible cultural heritage” of polyphonic singing in their Kam-Sui language, their special rice breed, skillful wooden architecture, and indigo dyeing. They have called the mountainous valleys and rice terraces of Guizhou Province home for thousands of years.
In Shangdiping, an old wooden tower sits in the middle of the village square. Wooden beams overlaid with ceramic roof tiles cover a firepit and several benches, a place for village meetings. In the winter, a roaring fire in the center provides warmth and a place to burn village trash, ashes flying through the air. The village has been like this for hundreds of years, originally settled by army fighters searching for a shanzhai in its original sense, a mountain stronghold.
Shangdiping is becoming part of the market economy, and its transition is full of magical juxtapositions. Entering the village, I stop to watch a pig being slaughtered along the river, in front of an E-Commerce Help Station that is coated in stickers advertising speedy courier companies: Zhongtong, Shunfeng, Tiantian. The large sow is bucking its front leg, squealing in agony, an eerie humanlike shriek that echoes loudly through the rice terraces. After a few minutes, it’s silent. One man nonchalantly blowtorches the pig, while another man, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, holds a shovel over the pig. He vigorously scrapes the pig to get the burnt hairs off, the motion jiggling the pig’s legs back and forth. The knife is still stuck in the pig’s chest. School has let out for the day and a dozen kids stream out from a wooden building into the town square, bouncing off the wood-framed buildings with elation. A pudgy young girl watches the pig slaughter. She gives a slow, throaty laugh as if it were the pig’s fault for getting killed.
The only restaurant in the village has no signage, but it is simple to find: it’s where people in the village square will direct you during lunchtime if it’s obvious you’re not from Shangdiping. Inside the restaurant, I sit and chat with the owner, Ren Fujiang, as he attempts to fix his Canon printer. Its plastic yellowing, and covered in dust, the battered printer won’t cooperate as he repeatedly removes and inserts the cartridge, his hands splattered with black ink. A large, bright red calendar with portraits of Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao is tacked onto the wall. Fujiang is trying to print out the next semester’s attendance sheet for the village elementary school. While many rural schools have been closed down for lack of willing teachers, it’s encouraging to see that there’s still an elementary school in Shangdiping. Fujiang’s son, Xiao Niu, tells me that they’ve had trouble keeping teachers around. Hopefully the new road will help, he says.
The food at this restaurant is humble. The restaurant is actually the first floor of Fujiang’s home, and the kitchen is his family kitchen. His son lights up the brick stove in the corner, coal burning underneath a large wok. A small bowl of stir-fried tomato and egg appears, pickled radishes, a few leaves from the season’s last cabbage, and rice from their family’s harvest. The choices are limited by what Fujiang and his family have grown over the past year and what they’ve managed to pickle. These tomatoes, the cabbage, and the rice are grown from heirloom seeds, preserved from previous years’ crops.
The portions are laughably diminutive compared to the large plates of food doled out in major cities. Yet the tomatoes are flavorful, the cabbage sweet and crisp. “This is all food we grow for ourselves,” Fujiang tells me. “We eat the good stuff—unlike you city people. No pesticides or fertilizer for us, too expensive to use that stuff anyway!” The dishes are heightened by fermented chili paste, which comes from the family’s chili plants. It’s so good that I ask Fujiang if I can buy some. He pauses, and then says it’s fine, but he has no container for me to put the paste in. His son riffles through a cabinet and emerges with a large empty Sprite bottle.
“How much is it?” I ask, and it takes him a minute to think through this. It’s clear that in this village, there are no hungry capitalists yet, no price stickers and scales. Finally, he says, “Is RMB 10 (US$1.40) a fair price? Can you pay me via WeChat?”
2.
Shangdiping is just one of many villages that the government hopes to lift out of poverty. Prior to opening the restaurant I eat at, the family had a life defined by subsistence farming. The rural village collective allocated each household enough land to plant, to feed themselves. Depending on weather and luck, the yearly harvest would yield enough food for a year, maybe a little extra if they were lucky. Taking care of the land was an incentive in itself, since it determined how well your crops would grow the next year.
Slowly, through local government policies, other options were created besides the gamble the family took on farming every year. And slowly too, younger generations started leaving the vi
llage, like Fujiang’s son, Xiao Niu, who is tall, thin, and quiet. He left to do construction work in the city of Guangzhou, bringing extra income back to the family.
Xiao Niu did not stay in Guangzhou. He now helps his family with work in the fields, cooking food for the occasional guest, and, as I glean from his WeChat feed, also helping with village construction projects. When he got back to Shangdiping, he married a local Dong woman. His wife occasionally comes into the house during our meal, her long hair uncut for at least a decade, piled on top of her head and held in place with wooden combs. They have a baby who toddles around the house, strapped into a walker.
Why didn’t Xiao Niu stay in Guangzhou? “City life is not designed to keep you there,” he says. “If you earn RMB 3,000 or 4,000 a month, that’s great money, sure, but city residents spend more than that just on rent. You can’t build a life off that.” Sometimes we play the game or the game plays us. And so Xiao Niu took the money he’d earned and returned home to the mountains of Guizhou, determined not to be played by the game. It at least was enough money to do things like improve his parents’ house and buy his dad a printer.
Part of tackling poverty means being able to measure and map it. There are disputes among experts in the field of international development on how to do this, especially on how to measure poverty in communities that rely on farming. Defining household assets is one method, but with farms, depending on the season when you take the measurements, assets will change before and after harvest season. Another method is quantifying household disposable income—the ability to purchase. It’s these on-the-ground variations, compounded into larger macro-economic figures, that lead to claims that global poverty is getting much better, or much worse. Yet these claims do not answer how people become poor in the first place, and, if we have found the key to eradicating poverty, why it still exists.
However you quantify it, the facts laid bare are these: Shangdiping and other places in rural China have higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy rates than cities. Education access is lower. And the entrenched poverty of China persists in its remote, rural, ethnic minority regions such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Ningxia, Guizhou, and Yunnan.
And so economic experiments are being unveiled as part of Rural Revitalization. These experiments rely on technology and the internet as catalysts, creating new socioeconomic ecosystems of rural entrepreneurship, hearkening back to the Town and Village Enterprises of the 1980s. Such initiatives use e-commerce, mobile payment, and broadband, bolstered by the traditional Chinese art of massive infrastructural projects like roads, walls, and high-speed rail. Accompanying these economic changes is also a shift in rural culture, as the dynamics of the market become interlinked with traditional family dynamics.
These experiments are unfolding across a wild landscape. A patchwork of private corporations and delayed government oversight exists alongside friction between peasant entrepreneurs and local government. More than an isolated experiment in rural China, the rural e-commerce explosion is testament to the interdependence between rural China and the rest of the world, in an age when most of our actual daily labor in cities has become shopping and consuming online.
3.
I tell Xiao Niu about the E-Commerce Help Station and the pig slaughtering. Shangdiping’s attempt at e-commerce is going very poorly, he says. He laughs good-naturedly when he says this, as if he doesn’t mind telling the truth—something people loathe doing these days, when preserving the image of success is about the same as achieving success.
“We just got the cement road in 2017, and even then, it’s a trek! We were supposed to post all our stuff online, on a Taobao store. People in Shanghai ordered some eggs after the road was opened and it took twelve days for the eggs to get to them. Not good if you’re just trying to make some dinner,” Xiao Niu says.
How do you quantify what could be sold from Shangdiping? I imagine an auditor coming into the village, making a checklist: pristine soil, organic vegetables, clean air. But a viable product is hard. Shipping vegetables requires refrigeration, which in turn requires more money. Fujiang’s complaint was that most urbanites didn’t even like the organic vegetables—too imperfect, too full of holes. I heard this same sentiment from several organic farmers, including one who sourced to Matilda’s Yimishiji platform. The solution in Shangdiping was to sell eggs.
E-commerce or not, Fujiang assured me that the village is going to develop. He pulls out his phone and shows me an illustrated development plan of Shangdiping. While Shangdiping currently has utilitarian stone bridges over the river, the development plan features highly elaborate Dong-style covered bridges, protected from the wind and rain. The village is pursuing a tourism strategy common in China—“cultural tourism,” which amps up the cultural capital of being a certified ethnic minority village. It explains the over-the-top performance of Dong culture in this development plan. Guesthouses abound through the village, along with single trees strategically placed by the roads, an odd detail given that Shangdiping is surrounded by forests of pine and ficus trees, punctuated by bamboo.
I had to ask an obvious question: “Last time I was here, I had to use the bathroom and it was a wooden board with a hole in it, placed over the river, a small fence for privacy. Will the development plan address this … issue?”
Fujiang laughs. “Yes, yes, we’re going to put in a wastewater system for the entire town. After that, it’s easy. We’ve already got broadband internet. Upstairs is our home and there are some extra rooms. We’re ready for tourists. Even now you can find us on the internet. Just look up ‘Slowly, Slowly Guesthouse and Restaurant.’ And let me know when you’re coming next. Bring all your friends!”
4.
Thousands of kilometers to the north of Shangdiping, in Shandong Province, the bathroom in Dinglou village is nearly glamorous, except for one design flaw: it is entirely transparent. Where walls should be, there are instead glass panes, showcasing your personal bathroom time as if you were onstage. Saddled with new wealth, the proprietors of the China Number One Taobao Village Hotel have opted for an elaborate interior design scheme that seems to scream CITY! LIGHTS! GLAMOR! The marble stairs from the lobby are narrow and dark, with a few slanted steps, but upstairs the hallway has deep blue lights—reminiscent of a derelict strip club or a Gaspar Noé film.
I’m here with a cinematographer and a director to shoot a movie on tech in China. We’re all sweaty and exhausted after twelve hours of filming. That night, our cinematographer is visited by a ghost.
When we reconvene the next morning, he tells us about it—it was a loud ghost yelling in Shandong dialect, trying to get a cigarette. “But all I’ve got is this e-cigarette,” our cinematographer replied. Annoyed, the ghost left the room, skulking back to where it was buried, across the street.
Dinglou village is a successful e-commerce town, tucked into the flat, dusty plains of Shandong. Its success shows in the restaurants, the paved roads, the bustling morning market, and even the village ghosts who have become rich enough to pick up smoking. The daily open-air market is a veritable bazaar of wonders, but the main highlight might be a man selling sesame oil out of an enormous wok the size of a small adult. Dinglou and its neighboring town, Daji, are unusually wealthy for villages in rural China. Dinglou is filled with these market spectacles, which go beyond typical rural open-air markets of vegetables and garlic. There is even a bakery that sells cakes with RMB 100 bills embedded in the frosting. The village boasts about its broadband fiber-optic cable, purportedly faster than internet in Shanghai. It’s a boomtown here, and it’s miserable.
At the Rural Internet Center, a short beige building located next to a swath of fields, an exhibit tells the fabled origin story of Dinglou’s success. An attendant hands each of us a bottle of lukewarm water as we stand in front of a large LCD screen. He turns on a video. The video’s sound blasts through large, cheap speakers placed throughout the exhibition hall, tiled in Taobao.com’s signature orange. “Rural Taobao is the future!” th
e narrator’s voice booms through the speakers.
In rural Taobao land, there is no government, just the rules of Taobao. Alibaba makes a range of platforms, including 1688.com (the digits when said out loud in Chinese sound like “Alibaba”), a domestic site for bulk purchases. But Alibaba is most well-known for Taobao.com, a huge e-commerce site that allows small businesses and individuals to sell directly to consumers. All the goods are new, and some of them are homemade. As of 2017, Taobao had six hundred million monthly active users, compared to Amazon’s three hundred million monthly active users. Everything, and I mean everything, can be found on Taobao: a gold-plated lighter in the shape of people in coitus that moans when you ignite it, umbrellas in an array of animal shapes and decorations, red dates the size of eggs, tea, fried-dough fritters, banned books, banned video games, and Adidas Yeezy shoes that range from obviously fake to high-quality fake (“AAA level” in knockoff lingo) to very much real.
The video we’re watching on how rural Taobao is the future flashes, spins, whirs in a thicket of video effects that look like they came from a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation circa 1990. The narrator describes how in 2013 the internet giant Alibaba launched the Rural Taobao strategy, aimed at improving the lives of those in rural China. It’s as if Google decided to turn itself into a branch of the United Nations, or as if Amazon decided it suddenly wanted to offer assistance to an Appalachian coal-mining town by helping its citizens start candy businesses and giving them Amazon-backed loans.
