Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang Reviewed in the NYT
Clive Thompson from NYT reviewed Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang! This glowing review details how Xiaowei introduces us to "quixotic figures, hopscotching across the country on a mission: to document how technology is transforming the lives of China’s rural poor."
From the review:
This creates a powder keg. “Young, able-bodied workers, especially young men, untethered from car or house ownership, job or family are threats to political stability,” Wang writes, an observation that might give Americans, too, a shudder of recognition. But whereas our federal government has given up on any serious national policy for its countryside, the Chinese government and private sector are busily — even desperately — trying to engineer a technologically fueled “rural revitalization.”
Wang has written a nuanced and thought-provoking account, and it is not easy to tell, after you’re done reading it, how rural China will fare — whether its tiptoe toward prosperity and tech savviness is durable. Given that China’s economic fate is now so entwined with the world, one hopes it can thread the needle. Visiting the “Cloud Computing Museum” of Alibaba, Wang sees the firm’s first homegrown server from years ago, adorned with a poem:
code
line by line
builds the foundation
for eternity
just like sand
grain by grain
calms the roaring sea.
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Interested in learning more? Hear Xiaowei Wang in conversation with An Xiao Mina on Monday, November 16, from 12:30-2pm in our Commons Conversations! More details here!