News/Research

Xiaowei Wang on Blockchain Chicken Farm at the Minderoo Center

27 Jan, 2022

Xiaowei Wang on Blockchain Chicken Farm at the Minderoo Center

Xiaowei Wang recently participated in an event with the Minderoo Center for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge to discuss their book, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside, exploring the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China.

From the event:

The book started off in a number of directions but also in my own capacity as someone who is working as an engineer in tech and also seeing a lot of discourse in US, China, tech cold war that was going on at the time. Often times too, especially in China, but also globally, we think of the rural as backwards in time so when we think of tech we think of places which we see here. The market where 90% of the world's hardware and electronic is manufactured in China and is shipped off. And where we think of the internet and tech as this dematerialized thing and that place somehow matters less and less, I would argue that place and materiality actually matters more than ever. When you see the genesis of Shenzhen as this high tech city, it has its roots as a town and village enterprises which were these small villages doing these kind of unorthodox experiments during China's opening up and reform period. These epxeriments were quite successful and this has been termed the rural roots of Chinese capitalism.

Watch the entire event here!