What’s in it for me? A fresh look at the future.
Where are the world’s hotspots for cutting-edge technological change?
Silicon Valley, university laboratories, your local Apple store?
How about the farms and fields of rural China?
These blinks take a look at the more subtle and unexpected ways that digital technologies are transforming the world.
This wide-ranging survey of contemporary China takes you from the country’s thriving mega-cities to its overlooked countrysides, all the while teasing out the incredible ways digital innovation and rampant globalization are reshaping daily life in the world’s most populous country.
In these blinks, you’ll learn where to buy the best fake products; how a village becomes a factory; and why Peppa Pig sometimes smokes cigarettes.
China is the product of complex relationships between the urban and rural.
Every year, all across China, a great migration takes place.
As winter begins to thaw, people crowd into buses, pack train stations, and take to the highway.
They’re on the move for Chunyun, or the Spring festival.
During this national holiday, more than 300 million people travel from China’s massive cities to their laojai, or ancestral homes, in the countryside.
It gives urban workers a rare chance to reconnect with their roots and visit the older generations who remain in smaller towns and villages.
But these hinterlands aren’t just places of rest and respite.
China’s extensive rural landscape has played a central role in the county’s economic, political, and social development.
The key message here is: China is the product of complex relationships between the urban and rural.
In the Western imagination, contemporary China is often defined by crowded megacities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen.
But when the People’s Republic of China was founded back in 1949, the country was largely rural and agrarian.
In fact, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party were only able to take power by galvanizing the nation’s extensive peasant population against the cities.
After establishing the People’s Republic, the communist government was determined to develop China.
It wanted to raise the standard of living and compete with Western powers.
This initial attempt to industrialize was known as the Great Leap Forward.
To implement it, the state relied on rural communities and resources.
It tried to boost agricultural production by collectivizing farming.
The state even encouraged villages to build their own small-scale factories.
Unfortunately, these disruptive policies resulted in widespread famine.
Still, the country pushed through and eventually found its footing.
In the ’80s and ’90s, China’s economy boomed.
Small rural businesses, called Town and Village Enterprises or TVEs, were a key fuel for that growth.
TVEs were more flexible than large state-owned companies.
They could be more responsive to changing economic demands.
By 1995, these companies were responsible for about a quarter of China’s GDP.
Today, many young people move to China’s largest cities in search of work.
Yet, 40 percent of the population still lives in the countryside.
The government wants to keep these communities thriving, so it plans to industrialize agricultural centers further.
It hopes to connect far-flung regions through building extensive IT infrastructure.
The goal is to have the city and countryside work together for the nation’s success.
China is using new technologies to make its food supply safe.
China did it first.
This triumphant theme comes up again and again in Chinese museums, history books, and in popular culture.
And it’s largely true.
The Chinese were the first to create revolutionary products like paper and gunpowder.
They were also the first to invent vinegar – the earliest recipe appears in Chinese texts from 1,500 years ago.
There’s even evidence that early Chinese farmers were studying genetic variation in domestic animals.
Now, in the twenty-first century, China continues to innovate.
Its latest novel creation can be found in a remote village called Sanqiao.
Here, in the poor mountainous region of Guizhou, you’ll find GoGoChicken, the first blockchain chicken farm.
The key message here is: China is using new technologies to make its food supply safe.
In China, safely producing food is a major challenge.
For starters, the country has 22 percent of the world’s people, but just 7 percent of Earth’s arable land.
So producing enough food for the growing population is tough, to begin with.
On top of this, China’s agricultural industry is largely decentralized.
That means food is grown and distributed by a complex network of millions of small farmers and traders.
The high demand for food and the chaotic supply system mean the country often struggles to enforce safety standards.
For instance, in 2008, several children died from milk tainted with melamine.
Dairy producers added the dangerous chemical to their milk in order to meet high production goals.
Because of incidents like these, China has an abysmal food-safety rating compared to countries with similar GDP per capita, such as Mexico and Turkey.
To curb this problem, the government, along with entrepreneurs, is increasingly experimenting with new technologies.
Enter the blockchain chicken farm.
This company raises high-quality, free-range chickens.
These birds sell at a premium price to wealthy diners in the coastal cities.
But these consumers want a guarantee that the chickens they’re buying are actually the chickens that are advertised.
To establish this trust, each chicken is tracked and monitored from the moment it’s born until it reaches the table.
A chicken’s data is compiled and stored using blockchain technology.
This distributed record-keeping system makes it extremely difficult to falsify any information.
So, when you buy a blockchain chicken, you can scan a code and see it’s entire life on a special website.
This way, you truly know what you’re about to eat.
Online learning is transforming rural China.
Meet Sun Wei.
Wei was born in Anhui, a rural region in central China.
His father worked as a mechanic for the local state-owned railway company.
And Wei, having only a vocational high school education, was expected to follow in his footsteps.
But Wei took a different path.
In his teens, he became fascinated with model planes.
Using the internet, he found a whole community of people building and flying them.
Soon, he was taking online classes and training to be a drone pilot.
Now, at 25, he’s a licensed drone operator.
And he’s putting his skills to work in the emerging field of precision agriculture.
For Wei, online training opened up a new life path.
But for many rural residents, poor access to education is still a barrier to success.
The key message here is: Online learning is transforming rural China.
Precision agriculture is still a new technology.
It involves digitally mapping small farms and using human-piloted drones to deliver pesticides and fertilizer in a targeted way.
A company called XAG is a leader in the field.
To run the business, it trains rural residents like Wei to operate the drones.
For people like Wei, the education and employment provide a previously unattainable level of income and opportunity.
Yet, a divide remains.
While rural residents can work as drone operators, the rest of XAG comes from a different demographic.
The people in the high-paid positions at the company – that is, the programmers, business administrators, and investors – all come from the city.
These are people with impressive credentials from prestigious institutions such as Tsinghua and Peking Universities.
In China, like most countries, education is the key to social and economic advancement.
But city dwellers have much better access to education than countryfolk.
Only 10 percent of rural residents continue education after high school.
In some regions, the high school dropout rate is above 50 percent.
To remedy this, China has turned to online learning.
In 2015, an elite urban high school, called Number 7 High School, began livestreaming classes to students in rural areas in Yunnan and Guangxi.
Initially, the experiment was a failure.
Poor internet infrastructure and family obligations kept rural students from really benefiting from the initiative.
But, three years later, 88 of these students were accepted at Tsinghua and Peking Universities.
It’s unclear if the program will work on a larger scale, but this small success is promising.
In China, innovation comes from sharing and tweaking ideas.
Imagine a small knick-knack, toy, or tchotchke – perhaps a disposable plastic figurine or a cheaply made bit of jewelry.
Now, think about holding that object in your hand and slowly turning it over.
You can already predict what you’ll find underneath: a tiny sticker emblazoned with the words “Made in China.
” In the 1990s, China’s economy boomed.
The country’s industrializing cities became powerhouses for manufacturing cheap commodities to be sold in the West.
The flood of discount goods soon earned China a reputation for making poor-quality knockoffs.
Yet, surveying the country’s technology sector today, it’s unclear if that reputation is still deserved.
In fact, China’s aptitude for creating low-cost adaptations of existing products may be its best asset.
The key message here is: In China, innovation comes from sharing and tweaking ideas.
When it comes to innovation, California’s Silicon Valley reigns supreme.
The Valley is always celebrated as the origin point of the world’s most cutting-edge products and services.
In contrast, there’s a persistent belief that China just doesn’t have the capacity to generate new technologies.
Instead, people think China has to copy from other countries.
There’s some truth to this.
In China, there’s a concept called shanzhai, which is a derogatory term for pirated goods.
The word literally translates as “mountain stronghold.
” That’s because rural mountain villages have sometimes created whole economies around making imitation products, from pirated DVDs to fake designer handbags.
Of course, these shanzhai economies only work by ignoring intellectual property rights.
But, is this necessarily a bad thing?
While shanzhai can be about creating knockoff iPhones, it can also be something more.
The idea that anyone can adapt and repurpose existing ideas for their own ends actually opens a whole new field of innovation.
That way, creative engineers can share ideas and remix products into an astounding array of new devices, even with few resources.
Just take a stroll through the Huaqiangbei electronics market in the manufacturing hub of .
Here, you’ll find hundreds of small-scale companies making everything from 3D printers to simple modular cell phones you can augment and repair on your own.
This huge array of incredible shanzhai shows that China’s culture of swapping, sharing, and DIY manufacturing is a type of innovation all of its own.
China’s surveillance state has both practical and ethical problems.
Your address and phone number.
Your last ten online purchases.
The exact distance between the inner corners of your eyes.
These fragmentary pieces of data are all stored in databases and servers scattered across the globe.
But, what happens when you bring these facts and figures together?
Do you get an accurate picture of the real you?
Probably not.
No facial scan or intricate algorithm can capture your hopes and dreams, your inner thoughts, or your true personality.
Still, that won’t stop governments and corporations around the world from collecting as much data as possible.
And China is no exception.
The key message here is: China’s surveillance state has both practical and ethical problems.
In the popular imagination, China is an authoritarian state where everyone is closely tracked by the state.
It’s true that the government monitors and restricts information in the media and on the internet.
But China’s actual surveillance operation is less slick than you might think.
Consider a city like Guiyang.
This growing metropolis contains many chengzhongcun, or urban villages.
These are sprawling, informal neighborhoods that are home to 80 percent of Guiyang’s crime.
To police the areas, authorities are attempting to catalog all the residents into a massive database.
But urban villages are populated by an ever-shifting community of rural migrants, so the task isn’t so easy.
Even after years of work, the spotty database includes only 60,000 people.
Companies like Face++ might offer a solution.
This Beijing-based start-up makes facial recognition software for private companies and the Sharp Eyes program – a government initiative that aims to use surveillance cameras to monitor public spaces.
Still, despite the hype, the program has stalled.
Chinese cities still have many fewer surveillance cameras than those in the US.
And the software isn’t always as accurate as advertised.
Oftentimes, a camera’s facial scan can misidentify a person or fail to see a face at all.
Even when data collection and surveillance efforts do work, there remains a host of ethical problems.
For one, these programs generally target poor and minority communities.
This excessive focus can create lopsided crime statistics that unjustly stigmatize these populations.
And once someone has been singled out by the system, their negative data can follow them for life, even as they grow and change as a person.
Internet commerce ties remote villages to the global economy.
Let’s take a trip to Shangdiping, a tiny village of 900 people in the mountainous Guizhou Province.
For the first thousand years of its existence, the only route to this community was a meandering footpath through the hills.
That all changed in 2018 when a new, paved road was built.
Shangdiping, like many remote villages, is slowly changing.
It’s now a patchwork mix of traditional and modern lifestyles.
Farm animals still wander the streets, but there’s a flashy new internet cafe.
The town’s single restaurant has no signage or set prices, but you can pay your bill with the smartphone app WeChat.
Many of these changes are the result of a nationwide effort to integrate China's rural communities into the wider economy.
At the heart of this effort is e-commerce.
The key message here is: Internet commerce ties remote villages to the global economy.
In the past few decades, China has become a huge economic player on the world stage.
But, this explosion of growth didn’t drastically alter life in remote villages.
Many villagers remained dependent on subsistence farming or increasingly moved to urban areas in search of work.
However, in recent years, some villages have been adapting to the internet economy.
This change is fueled by the e-commerce giant Alibaba and its website Taobao.
com, a major shopping platform.
In 2013, the company launched the Rural Taobao strategy.
It aimed to transform rural communities into hubs of online commerce.
First, the company opened Rural Taobao Service Centers to help villagers buy goods from Taobao.
com.
Then, it sent officials to teach local residents how to sell goods on the website.
The result of this effort is Taobao Villages.
These are communities where more than 10 percent of village households are manufacturing goods to sell on Taobao.
com.
Villagers have found success selling everything from small trinkets and locally grown produce to traditional handicrafts and elaborately constructed shanzhai products.
By 2018, there were more than 3,000 Taobao Villages across 24 Chinese provinces.
This sounds like a win-win for both Taobao and village residents.
But the outcomes of this system are a mixed bag.
While the influx of money has raised local incomes, it’s also added new stress.
Families struggle to balance traditional farming with the demands of Taobao sales.
Also, the sudden uptick in unregulated manufacturing can harm local ecosystems.
In spite of these downsides, the Taobao system is set to continue its explosive rise.
China’s youth faces life with a mix of anxiety and ambition.
On British television, the cartoon character Peppa Pig is a friendly young piglet who learns important life lessons about growing up.
But on the Chinese internet, this animated star has a different persona.
This Peppa wears dark sunglasses, smokes cigarettes, and believes in nothing.
What accounts for this drastic shift?
In China, Peppa Pig has been adopted as an ironic meme and mascot by shehui ren.
Shehui ren, translated as “society person,” is a catch-all term for disillusioned youth who feel discarded and alienated by mainstream life.
Some strata of Chinese society have benefited from the country’s exponential growth, but many struggle to find their footing in the shifting economic and cultural landscape.
For a shehui ren, the internet is a place to express discontent and search for meaning.
The key message here is: China’s youth faces life with a mix of anxiety and ambition.
Just as the US touts the American Dream, Chinese culture also has a shared aspirational mythos.
This Chinese Dream calls for everyone to work hard in school, get a good job, and build a stable adult life, being productive and raising a family.
Of course, for many, unequal access to opportunities and rising economic inequality make this life path feel completely out of reach.
So, in response, the younger generation turns toward shehui ren culture.
Rather than striving for white-collar work or traditional success, these youths spend their days venting anxieties on the internet using video streaming apps like TikTok and Kuaishou.
Studies have found that the typical Kuaishou user is under 25, without high pay or higher education, and lives in a rural area or unimportant city.
But these apps foster their own type of economy.
Some youths leverage their internet presence to hun shehui, or hustle and get by.
Many Kuaishou users host elaborate livestreams where they hawk products like cosmetics and foods.
Others simply build a fanbase with entertaining observations, relatable rants, and a form of internet companionship.
This form of online entrepreneurship keeps many youths afloat economically and connected socially, but the government is less than pleased.
Shehui ren culture reflects a large population of anxious and alienated young people.
That’s usually a recipe for economic and social disorder down the line.
In 2017, the state even began censoring nihilistic Peppa Pig memes.
But until more young people expect to have a stable future, these feelings of discontent won’t disappear.
Final summary
China is a country that contains bustling megacities and millions of far-flung rural communities.
The nation’s future is bound up in both these settings, especially as new technologies change the way life works in the countryside.
The internet is connecting small villages to the global economy, helping isolated students find new career paths, and transforming how young people see their futures.