Wang, X. (2020). Blockchain chicken farm: And other stories of tech in China’s countryside. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
In Blockchain Chicken Farm, Wang mixes personal narrative, journalism, and critical discussion of developments in technology in China and cross-cultural cognates in the United States. Readers get a grounding in some of the nuances in place in different developments in China, which help to not only inform, but also contextualize the challenges and developments in the region. Among many interesting themes on community, the individual, privacy, and politics is a good meditation on rural communities and their wisdom and relevance in technological development.
I can’t help but read this wonderful work as an extension of, inheritance from, and application of comparative rhetoric, especially the work, by Hall and Ames, Anticipating China. I am writing this in the midst of Chapter 5 where Wang is explaining her own associations and experiences with the phrase “Made in China” as a child and how Joseph Needham in the 1960s posed the question: “Why did China never develop modern science?” What’s being discussed are the deterministic lenses in these phrasings, the surpluses of meaning from these associations, and the importance of understanding how a term like “innovation” is not devoid of context—it is “laden with baggage.” Wang’s writing brings all this to the fore, but in a readable way that would be so accessible to students. Hall and Ames are great, but they are not so accessible.
One favorite quote of mine, given my interest in transnationality is when Wang highlights how global supply chains really undercut claims of local development in technology; she writes, “Indigenous innovation is just a nationalist parlor trick.”
I would encourage assigning chapters or perhaps the whole text across a range of writing courses, but I think that for my teaching, Chapter 5 is the best single chapter to cover a range of themes and also dig into the writing choices.