 My name is Maureen Ebihanem and I'm a PhD student here at Columbia's Urban Planning Program and I'll be moderating the session. I will start with a few brief logistical announcements and then introduce our speaker. During the talk, I'd like to remind audience members to please mute your microphones. Anyone in the audience who wishes not to be recorded today should turn off their video input. The chat box should only be used for discussion regarding the session. If you have technical questions that apply only to you, please message me privately or my co-host Joe Hennigan's. We encourage all of you to type questions into the chat box during the presentation. After the presentation, we will have time for Q&A. We'll start Q&A around 2 or 2.15 so that we have time to go over everyone's questions. I'll be coordinating the Q&A with attention to diversity and inclusion. So if you have already had the chance to ask questions, please allow others to do so before asking another one. And finally, to ask questions, participants can either use the raise the hand feature in Zoom and we will call on you to unmute. Or you may also type your question in the box and I can read them out. Chow Wei is a designer, writer, and coder. The creative director at Logic Magazine, their work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been finalists for the Index Design Awards and featured by the New York Times, the BBC, CNN, Vice, and elsewhere. Their most recent project, The Future of Memory, was a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm and other stories of tech in China's countryside. Today, Chow Wei's talk entitled Blockchain Chicken Farms and Tabao Villages asks, What happens when tech goes down to the countryside? Smart cities, digital urbanism, and the urban space of tech-enabled surveillance have been well documented. However, what awaits in the periphery in those places that manufacture the hardware we use? In their talk, Chow Wei looks at the flows between rural America and rural China through online consumption culture and platform-enabled e-commerce. From the religious performance of American multi-level marketing to the self-improvement tones of Tabao villages in China, our speaker argues that tech is carving out new spaces and behaviors in countryside struck by new liberal precarity. Chow Wei discusses China's rural revitalization project, challenging our metronormativity and the ways the periphery influences our social and political lives as urbanites. Chow Wei, if you're ready, I'll pass things over to you now. Great. Yeah, thank you again for inviting me. So lovely to give this talk, especially in the planning department. I thought that I would start out first by acknowledging that I'm calling in from the Bay Area, which is on unceded Aloni territory. I also would actually like to start off by reading just a very short intro from the book, which might be weird for an academic setting, but I guess because, you know, we do book readings at bookstores, but it's fine. So yeah, so this is a very short section from the introduction of the book. There it is. The dynamics of rural China are not isolated to China itself. Yet because of its geographic distance from the United States, it remains a kind of periphery. These rural peripheries the edges of the world hidden from view enable our existence in cities. These areas produce everything from the cotton and the clothes we wear to the minerals that create the computers and data centers. They produce the food we eat as humans we eat to survive and our appetite for food has carved new geographies and technologies into the world. Urban night appetites have shifted rural economies, ecologies and societies over the past three decades. Looking at technology in rural China in places that show how globally entangled we are with one another allows me to confront the scarier question that technology poses. What does it mean to live to be human right now. Looking at tech in rural China forced me to examine the ideologies that drive engineers and companies to build everything from AI farming systems and blockchain food projects to shopping sites and payment platforms. These assumptions about humans and the way the world should work are more powerful than just sheer technical curiosity. What's embedded in these tools are the makers and builders assumptions about what humans need and how they think humans should interact. It is not enough to critique these assumptions. Because in simply critiquing, we remain caught in the long list of binaries. Tech is dehumanizing tech brings liberation tech dragged us into the mess that we're in and tech freeze us from this mess. It creates isolation and tech connects the difficult work that we face is to live and thrive beyond binaries and assumptions and to aid and enable others to do so. So how do we begin this work. At the age of 95, five years before her death, the activist Grace Lee Boggs wrote the next American Revolution. Published in 2010 the book sounded an alarm bell for our present condition, a time when politics was no longer politics as usual, and when ecological disaster brought by unfettered material and technological growth was looming. Despite all this, she pointed to a source of hope, which is the great turning. The great turning refers to a growing tidal wave of people now taking the first step toward change, addressing spiritual impoverishment. These are the times to grow our souls she writes the way to respond to crisis is to practice compassion and change the cycle of suffering. We can all actively practice compassion in our own way, whether we are doctors teachers or business people, engineers and makers and builders of the technology have this opportunity. I hope this book sparked something for you. After all, code is words made executable and we must take care and what we say. And for those of us who see a code as apocryphal texts who see technology as indeed accelerating us towards a despondent tightly controlled world. I hope this book reaffirms the power that you hold and being human and demonstrates ways certain technologies might actually serve open systems. To spark the great turning we need to transform our compassion our imagination and our society we cannot focus on simply reforming our technologies alone. And most of all, I hope that this book brings you to parts of China that you might never visit beyond a map of abstractions a flat map made by metronormativity. So now, I'll start the talk in a more traditional format and I'll show some slides when the juggle. You are now made a co host shall we so these let me know if you're having any trouble sharing. Okay, I have multiple desktops and this always happens. Okay. All right. Can everyone see this title site. Okay, great. So yeah, I didn't actually mean to end up in rural China. I get this question a lot from people who come to talks and they're like, how did you get caught up in such a niche topic. After studying rural China for so long I started the research process maybe like four three and a half years ago. To me, I'm like this is not a niche topic like this is something that we have to be thinking about. And I'll go to why in a second. But I think that really thinking about the rural as constitutive of the urban is key. Especially in the times that we live in. So my research really challenged me to, you know, own up and think about these ideas of metronormativity so it's this word that is coined by query theorist Jack Halberstam which refers to which is referred to as like the dominant story of migration from the countryside to the city, right. And we probably think of examples, just even anecdotally like the story of like, oh, we'll just go to the city and we'll experience this new like place of liberation and economic opportunity. This kind of supremacy of the city as cosmopolitan and the rural as really backwards in time right. And so I think challenging this metronormativity also makes us think about modernity and what we think of as development right and sustainability. So there's a long tradition of looking at rural areas as backwards and stuck in this quaint time. There's this book the charisma machine which I highly recommend. But all of this, this concept of development is under what folks call ICT for D the, you know, internet communications technology for development and there's been a number of schemes throughout the years. So Facebook with its free basics program. You see the weather balloon that's project loon which is Google's project to like give internet to the poor rural areas of the world. There's a Microsoft hole in the wall project, which like just literally takes a wall and makes a hole and puts a computer in there right. And so I think one of the things the charisma machine really highlights is, you know, this idea of just giving folks in these backward quote unquote backward regions of the world technology. It's applying a technical fix to a social problem right and that's never really going to work the way that you imagine it to work. I also think it's important to highlight that that you know we all live in 2021. So the fact that some places of the world don't look like San Francisco or Shanghai, says more about the way that we think about these spaces, rather than the need to bring these spaces to our modern day and time right. And of course, many architects, you know, still like this notion of the rural being backwards so it becomes almost like a zoo right of like, look at these farmers they have computers it's so exotic and it's a deeply problematic way and I think it's also very dehumanizing for people who live in rural areas right. So my journey into researching the countryside actually began in Shenzhen. So you know the statistics of Shenzhen as a city manufacturers 90% of the world's electronics mega city of 13 million people. And this is actually this old 1984 map. Back when Shenzhen was still developing of the town and village enterprises so it was like this very cluster village driven mode of economic development that was really from the grassroots up right. And so the urban villages of Shenzhen today, kind of tap into that history as a reminder of that history. So I began in Shenzhen which is now this huge city it's home to Huaqiao Bay, which is shown here. And it's this sprawling electronics market of like a couple city blocks wide. It's also home to Shanzhai, which is translated loosely as mountain stronghold this practice of making knockoff DVDs and electronics for people who couldn't afford name brand electronics, so people from mountain strongholds. And I look at this in my book specifically, arguing that instead of simply knockoffs, which has all these connotations of racialized labor right because it's seen as knockoffs because these mindless Chinese factory drones must not be able to be creative. So it must be a knockoff. I actually think that Shenzhai is this really interesting phenomenon to challenge how we think about both ownership intellectual property and invention and creativity. So I highly recommend actually Sylvia Lintner's prototype nation for those who are interested in a deep dive on this phenomenon. You know Shanzhai because it does challenge IP. It is this kind of fast open moving open source where, you know, anyone can, you know, tweak modify and change this hardware that's being made. So it really starts to call into question like, well, you know, you have an Apple iPhone right now right and if you break it you need to take it to the Apple store even the machinery to open up the iPhone is proprietary and specialized and Shanzhai is very counter to that. It's about modularity. It's about open source it's about the right to repair and being able to intervene on these systems. So this time I met David Lee from the Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, and he was like, just go to the countryside like Shenzhen, New York, Shanghai, all these cities have very similar patterns of technology use. What you're going to find is something really much more fascinating and actually challenging in the countryside. I wanted to dig in and encountered, you know, this economist who is talking constantly about the rural origins of Chinese capitalism. And so for those who haven't been to China the countryside and the city are pretty different. And in the book I talked a touch upon agrarian transition, which is a process that allows places like Shenzhen to exist. It's a process that has already happened in the US. So, it's basically what agrarian transition is is, you know, a declining number of farmers, due to the entry of industrial agriculture and industrial agriculture, requiring large consolidation of land. And what you find that is that in enables urban growth right so you have less farmers for people in cities, more efficient industrialized agriculture, the rise of a white collar working class like software engineers. And it's really, you know, what we see in the rural American landscape now right, we have like these huge industrialized factory farms with corporate lobbyists. What I always like to mention is that you know there's actually only 2 million farmers left in the US. But at the same time the American Farm Bureau Federation which is like this Federation of basically big agribusiness they have 6 million members. So, it just says a lot about the landscape of American farming is that it's basically corporate lobbyists from like Monsanto. So, China right now is kind of facing this right there's still a lot of the bulk of farmers are smallholder farmers. And this really becomes, you know the question of like how do you balance all this. You know, I'm sure some of you have seen the stories of like migrants from the countryside in the cities, not having equal access to social services. And I'm kind of like well we can't have everyone going into the city how do we keep people in the countryside basically. And you know around this of course the central issue of, I mean global agricultural trade right that food is a commodity, and not really fully the thing that we eat right so in the US we actually produce far more food. So that we can trade it and this goes into this crazy financial realm of commodities and futures trading. So I think through all of this what I really have come across that I think speaks to a really clear framework for thinking about this is Ananya Roy's idea of the rural and the urban as forms of governance, rather than these issues of like density or you know there must be something cultural or time based about rural versus urban. And I think so this image in the back really points to it where we think of it as a form of governance right this kind of urban sense of like total surveillance control, like making sure that everyone's this like accounted for citizen. So this form of governance is now pretty prevalent in the countryside so you have these cameras monitoring everything on this industrial hog farm. One of the things that I talked about in the book is the rise of tech companies implementing things like pig face recognition to scale up hog farming. And the reason why they use all these cameras and sensors is to you know, make sure that pigs are biosecure right that they maintain biosecurity so that one sick pig doesn't just like tear through the entire farm. This is the blockchain chickens. Speaking of food as more of a commodity now this is the blockchain chicken farmer farm and young. And you know, beautiful, lovely farm in this pretty remote area of Guizhou, and he was encountering all sorts of issues with getting his. chickens, not only to market because of lack of infrastructure, but then also this basic issue of food security, food safety and trust, because all these big agribusinesses so the US also went through this as well so you can think of like uptowns was the jungle with like meat slaughtering like these food safety laws in the 1920s in the US right so China because there's all these big agribusinesses coming in and these smaller farmers who are really pressured to produce and you know it's just harder and harder to gain profit when you're being pressured by a large agribusiness. So, you know, farmers start to cheat, but they cheat badly right. So you can think of the melamine milk scandal where dairy farmers added melamine into milk powder to try and basically like increase the amount of powder for how much dairy that they're putting in. And so Farmer Jiang when he was trying to sell his chickens at first there are these beautiful free range chickens. No one really believed him that they were free range. So this tech company came in and implemented blockchain chicken farm, and it's on a proprietary blockchain. So which means that no one but the company actually is able to see the records. And this is sold on JD.com for around like $35 to $40. The chicken has this you can see that little bracelet on its wrist. And you can scan the QR code, you can learn a lot about the chicken, like how many steps it's taken how much it weighed. But you know when I was talking to Farmer Jiang he was like yeah I sold all of these chickens like they were very popular and it's mainly upper middle class urbanites in China who are willing to pay for this right it's quite expensive. This is a image of the village so this contrast between you know this like high tech seeming product but ultimately it's like I see it as a form of like marketing right, making its entry way into this beautiful area. One of the things that they mentioned which was really interesting was like, you know, they're trying to economically develop and they have a lot of young folks who used to live in the village who went to the cities for college they're like moving back and trying to find ways to economically develop the village. And you know there is that pressure right of like Farmer Jiang couldn't really sell his chickens because there was such lack of trust around food safety issues and just like not not great prices being paid for agricultural commodities in the first place. So I also visited a Taobao village. I don't know how many of you are familiar with Taobao. I feel like Taobao villages have been talked a lot about in urban planning literature. I'm not sure. But this is China's number one Taobao village, and it's located in Shandong province which is more towards the north. And it's not mountainous. So, you know, this area is easy to put roads in like very easy to like get infrastructure and So in this Taobao village. They produce dance and stage uniforms. They produce like 70% of dance and stage uniforms for China so you know stuff that like you would see people wearing for a film like a period documentary or sorry like a, you know, like 1949 war drama or something like that. And so just to give you a little bit of background Taobao is, you know, owned by Alibaba, which recently has made headlines. But it's really this, I mean it's kind of like eBay slash Amazon, but it only sells new products so you can buy anything on Taobao can get cheap brains, food, these really cool troll lighters can also get banned video games and sellers have gotten really smart about bypassing the kind of automated image recognition so Resident Evil 2 is banned and so sellers would hand draw the covers for the videos to like bypass getting it taken down. And these Taobao villages, I'm sorry that this map slash figure is a little bit outdated but it's been experiencing a lot of exponential growth so in 2014 there was only around 200 of them, 2016, 1300 or so and then at this point I think there's like several of these. At first they're mainly located along the coast, but Alibaba actually has a rural development Institute, which they like to think of themselves as like somewhere between an NGO or like related to the World Bank. And they study this and they try to like, you know document and track these Taobao villages in a fair detail. So, this rural Taobao strategy has two prongs to it which is rural citizens as consumers. And so they have these Taobao stations in these rural villages, where you can go and you're a villager and you're like, Oh, it would be great to like buy some fancy things from Taobao, right? Like I deserve this. And so you go on to Taobao.com and you have people who are like assisting you in buying things from Taobao, so shampoo, train tickets, everything. For the rural development Institute they say that this is a form of digital literacy. How you can spend it. But of course in order to buy things you need money, right? And certainly with the tangled web of global agricultural trade like you selling wheat is not going to be enough to buy your fancy shampoo. So they're like, Okay, well we'll also have rural citizens as sellers. So that's these Taobao villages where they're starting to, you know, sell things from like. So it's instead of like, you know, if you're a potato farmer instead of just selling potatoes you're like adding some process to them they put chili flakes on this in the village that I visited and they make them into like spicy potato chips that you can buy on Taobao. Of course the one where I visited and spent the most time in with a dance uniforms like that's an extreme right it's totally unrelated to anything that they used to grow. And this is a policy that you know is really embraced by on the national level. It's this idea of revitalization right like we're reinvigorating the countryside. It used to just be old people and small children who are left behind by their parents who gone off to the city to work in factories, but now we're creating this new kind of economic opportunity. So this is a rural Internet Center in the village, this particular village that was making the stage uniforms. You can see that it really still is like a farming town right so it's this one building. It's a rural Internet Center and across the street it's fields. Inside. So once you get to the town it's this wild like, you know, really kind of family extended family like business where people are working out of their garages so this was one of the workshops. Everyone likes to employ members of their family which is why you see a lot of middle aged or elderly women. And, you know, the first entrepreneur I'll get to I'll get to him in a second actually. So, you know, this is another scene from one of the, from one of the workshops. So it's really this whole ecosystem. You have like one family who's making these giraffe headpiece things. You have another family who's doing more screen printing, another family who's like you know doing embroidery. And so this entire village has really been subsumed by this costume industry. Sorry, I didn't really like these crazy costumes they also have this knock off snow white costume that I became obsessed with. So yeah so this is a picture of the outside of what those workshops look like. You would never guess that's what they look like on the inside. But behind the workshops you still have like the family agricultural fields, and they're telling me that it's almost like gig farming. So in the agricultural high season they'll do farming, and then they'll you know, supplement their income with producing these costumes. So this was the first entrepreneur in the village. So I'll talk a little bit about him. So he is actually now the village party secretary now he was voted in he actually didn't want the job at all because he was, he's pretty he says he's pretty busy with all you know raising kids running a business farming. And he had heard about Taobao from, you know, just like some he used to work in the city he had heard about Taobao there and he kind of brought this back to the village. His wife wasn't able to work. He had started to for like, she had injured her back because she was working at a sand quarry. So he started the first Taobao village Taobao business in the village. He actually was telling me he didn't know how to type Chinese onto a computer because he didn't finish grade school so he had to use his daughter's opinion textbook to figure out how to like put the listings onto the computer. So now he's like making, I think he told me was around like one million US dollars a year, and he's like shipping internationally as well, because Amazon has made it pretty easy for foreign sellers to sell on Amazon. These are just scenes, more scenes from the village it's this, you know, you have the contrast of like the wet market but still happens alongside. I feel like the cake with 100 RMB bills just kind of summarizes how flush the village has become with cash. And so you can see this was another workshop that I visited this husband and wife. They were specialized in army uniforms, or like not real army uniforms but obviously for like dramas, and it's very much a, you know, start up affair I guess. And here's also the grandmother helping out. They were telling me that for the grandmother, she derived, I think a sense of like purpose and not just being old and sitting around. So of course, you know, this was like the kind of, you know, optimistic side that I think a lot of people like to think about and represent. Of course, everyone in the village uses and financial, which is the sister company of Alibaba so they use this mobile app for it. Fiscal transactions, they can also take money out through the Taobao village like service stations, but mobile banking is kind of the default in these villages. And somehow the weird mix of market and state is both dystopic but also not. I don't know that foreign from what we see in the US. So all of these things actually plug into this larger system of American entrepreneurship so dropshipping has gotten really big. You know, I don't know how many of you are on Facebook live in the weird crevices of the internet, but essential oils suburban housewives in red voting states selling essential oils and all like, you know, leggings all these things. All of it is really fueled by the explosion of these smaller e commerce manufacturers, because it's so much cheaper. It's what David Harvey calls like the spatial fix right like it gets really expensive to manufacture in big cities, like Walmart can have its own factory, but now there's this other ecosystem where, you know, you as a midsize entrepreneur in the US can buy things off of Aliexpress or Alibaba.com from these smaller manufacturers can try doing dropshipping, play some Instagram ads. You know, sell on Amazon so this this our coat. It's very popular on Amazon and tick tock right now. But that's actually, you know, a factory home factory in rural China right this kind of weird in between of you going to like a big clothing manufacturer or like a boutique at sea handmade kind of like mid middle space. One brand strategist I talked to she was like, it's the future it's like new retail like everyone can be an entrepreneur on Instagram. And of course, you know this has been like a zone ecosystem of dropshipping tools, Instagram fakes. So I will just end there and open it up for questions one thing that I will say is that I did manage to talk to one person who was really cynical. And he was talking about the taba village and he said, you know, it's really like Alibaba is a vampire that sucks the blood out of everything. You know, they're using government built infrastructure because the government puts in the fiber optic cable the roads everything right. And the one thing that they don't tell you when you start becoming an entrepreneur is that you have to buy ads. And it's this incredible race to the bottom, where you're buying ads. And multiple people who are starting their own like so he made shoes dance shoes, like multiple dance shoe sellers, and he's just, you have to cost cut in ways that you can't even imagine. And he was just like, it's all a scam but everyone knows that and we're just trying to get rich while we can before this fades away. And this actually speaking of the rural development Institute and trying to think of themselves as like a NGO or development agency. Alibaba is actually trying to export this model to other areas along the one belt one road initiative so places in Southeast Asia they're trying to partner with places and like Rwanda as well as South Africa to think of like, oh well we can help you revitalize the countryside through this e commerce model and supply chain. Yeah, open it up for questions. Thank you so much for this fascinating presentation. We would like to open it up to questions, as you said so as a reminder to ask questions participants are encouraged to either use the raise your hand feature in zoom and I will call on you to unmute. Or you can also type your questions in the chat box and we can read them out. Hi, that was that was so cool. I feel like you kind of have brought to the surface like the kind of the commerce that underlies like you know the growth of Amazon right which we care about like all the time. But we never really can sit and we kind of factually know that you know there's this entire like industry in rural China that in kind of other parts of you know these kind of global south countries as well that are kind of fueling this growth but you never really kind of see or kind of think about these spaces and more detail. So I thought was really interesting. What I guess like one question that I had about your talk, kind of mentioned that there's this kind of rural urban like governance tension. But what struck me, especially in the kind of the latter half of your presentation about the tab out villages is that kind of all these villages seem to be governed by like Alibaba. So there's really this kind of like e commerce governance. That seems like really, you know, present in China. So could you talk about that a little bit and also kind of in relation to how these have like large e governance corporations interact with the with the government like the Chinese like that kind of image that you had of, you know, like did you tell about today kind of the connection between like you know China, like you know Chinese government and like this kind of e commerce governance. Yeah, so I don't know if that was a synced enough question but I think you get the idea. No, that's a great question. I was just, I have a friend who studies the social credit system in in depth. So beyond the hype in major cities in China, and we always talk about this where in some like really scary ways like you know these are governing all these facets across the urban and the rural it's like this weird new form of nation statehood that, you know, so Alibaba through the Alipay app that's where the credit score is implemented right. And so it's like, you know, it has these tentacles into the countryside it also has these tentacles in the city, where you're using credit for a different purpose right. So what we're seeing to like governments, specifically Chinese government is not psyched on this in recent years you know they're having Jack Ma under supervision all these regulatory questions, because it is a challenge to state power. In the US actually, you know, I guess it's up for debate some, but I think in the US there's actually like very little regulatory action taken towards these large corporations, tech companies in terms of like, how much power they're logistics over banking over all these things. In terms of just like this weird like e governance that's emerging. I don't. Yeah, I don't know what will become of it. Um, but I think it's interesting to always like, like see the similarities that are happening across these different borders. And also how connected everything is by by capital. Did that answer your question I might have missed a part linear. Yeah, thank you. Shall we this was absolutely riveting thank you so much. In your conversations in some of these tabo villages what is the perception seems like there's a real sense of urgency to kind of jump in and get in while the getting's good is there. What are the conversations around the longevity of this the sustainability of this like what what is this economy looking like on the ground for for people who are engaged in it and what do they think the future holds. I think ultimately it comes down to the fact that they don't really have a choice right. For a number of ecological and environmental reasons, you know, farming's just not as profitable as it used to be. And so as they're getting squeezed like this is really kind of the only alternative to that right there are some models of. So in the book I talk about this one like organic rice farming co op this village that has really gone against what the local governments. Agricultural Bureau is telling them and they're trying to revitalize farming and in this more sustainable way but they're encountering a lot of tension right because it just goes against the paradigm in so many ways. So the tabo village one it's more just like, well we kind of have no choice and like while we can still do it we might as well be the first to get all this infrastructure and make some money and then maybe in the future, you know, and I think that part of the government that folks that this happens to is that the village really becomes more of a town becomes more of like maybe a smaller city. And then you just have like one, one or two like large companies that are just farming the land and it's really consolidating consolidating the land and making it more efficient. And has a question. Yeah, building off of one year's question and what you just told us how has this influx like massive influx influx of cash has have reshaped the urban landscape of these villages, because I imagine there's, you know, like logistic centers or other type of infrastructure but what else has been going on in the built environment of these villages. Yeah. It's someone termed it. It's a half hazard lack of planning so a lot of the villages that I visited, you know, just to give you a sense before like these villages didn't have like wastewater treatment and have you know, plumbing systems things like that right. And so you go to these villages now and it's like, there is so much development happening in such a short time that a lot of the infrastructure is actually quite shoddy. And, you know, so they brag about having like, oh, we have the internet that is faster than Shanghai is that's like fiber optic cables being built in. And then at the same time like you, you go to like some of the places and they're just like, well we don't have water for like hot water for today, like sorry about that. So it's this, this contrast. And to your point about the logistics centers that is definitely happening across the countryside I mean it's, I live in California and it's weird to see like the different kind of mirroring effects because we have a lot of Amazon warehouses here like I think in rural America like logistics and rural prisons are like the biggest economic development sectors. And so in rural China, it's, I mean, it's very similar, lots of logistics centers going in. We have a question in the chat box I'm going to read it out for you. So I'm really intrigued by the contrast between your depiction of China's rural area, both farming and Taobao villages, with the rise of influencers like Lee Siki who's reach ultimately depends on an idyllic mirage of rural Chinese villages. So I guess it was more of a comment from coral saying. I think there's some people who term that like rural gentrification, which is, I think a really interesting term to think about but happening also globally right like young folks were like I'm going to go back into the countryside and like live my digital nomad life and as an influencer and it's it's interesting that like globally there is this rise as well. I have another question from Chai Fan Wang. Thanks for the great presentation. I'm wondering in your opinion does Taobao village phenomenon really revitalize the rural area, or is it more an intrusion to the local community. It's definitely an intrusion. It's more of a was that the creative destruction of capitalism. It's like good for a little while but none of these like infrastructures the buildings it all has this like very temporary feeling like from the photos probably got the sense that like all the buildings are just like we'll put them there and so probably will not use them in a few years right. Thank you. There's another another question from Iris. So thanks Chauwe do you or the villagers you spoke to see this as a kind of alternative model going to work in a bigger in this in bigger industrial factories and the typical stereotype of large scale factories were familiar with. For instance, it seems that villagers see in this model the ability to maintain family ties as a plus versus moving away and living in dormitories. I mean that's definitely, you know, what there is all these signs like nothing beats coming home and running your own Taobao business and so many of the kind of literature that you can get at the like town halls is all about like college grads moving back home to take care of their grandparents and you know this software engineer coming back home and helping their dad with their Taobao business. And I think it is a plus, but at the same time like because it's so precarious. Like, you know, you're coming home to help your parents with this like new this like form of farming that could be sustainable or this other thing that could be sustainable so yeah it's weird precarious balance. I had a question for you, building off of this precariousness of such, you know, such e commerce business. So what, you know, in general, like, what are the challenges that these Taobao villages have faced after adopting, you know, the Taobao model. And could you talk more about this like precarity, like why is it not sustainable. What is standing in the way of this being a more long term solution to some of these villages that are not able to farm or access urban areas or other services. Yeah, I think a lot of this is like it's, you know, there's something really concrete and fascinating about the built environment of the Taobao village right and these different contrasts. And yet at the same time it's always within this larger context of markets pricing things like that. And so, as an example, like, there were some failed Taobao villages there were also some other villages that were like maybe a little bit more streamlined, but there are some failed Taobao villages that I visited. And ultimately it came down to the same thing which is like, you know, they were selling kiwis, and then it turns out that this other village is like actually we're selling kiwis too. And it's just like at a certain point, like, like you just have the farmers taking all the risk on this platform right. Whereas national agricultural policy there is like forms of subsidies like grants things like that that are designed to like offset risk a little bit I mean that's slowly disappearing but there's this like competition. You know, things get more expensive as you go inland, which is why the rural development Institute folks they're like yeah we prefer it when places along the coast do Taobao villages because it makes us look more successful and actually like excuse the numbers. When places inland do it because they're just not competitive as production sites. It's interesting I have so many questions but I'll leave others to it. We have one more question in the chat box from Nicholas wrap. Hi, Charlie thank you for your great talk. Would you possibly speak about the Taobao villages as a type of spatial products like the special economic zone. Could you talk a bit more about how this is expanding into other countries like you mentioned at the end. So that's actually an area of research that I'm just starting to look into more. I think that it is like a strange and weird fascinating ecosystem right where it's, I think before like you have like Keller Easterlings like zone right where we think about these free trade zones and they're like very much like very different driven and you know these big corporations, but there is something that I would love to continue looking into this, which is this like middle sized strange zone right like spatial model of the village, where it's not like clearly you know Alibaba it's, it's not like Alibaba is like okay we like built this gigantic area and it's very industrialized there's still something very like informal about it. So I'm just plugging into like an end consumer that's like not shopping at like Nordstrom right it's like the person who's like I want a knockoff version of or like kind of looks similar but like not name brand version of this winter coat right. So yeah I think it's interesting to look into for the future. Joe has a question. Yeah, I was wondering if you could just talk a little more about the concept of Metro normativity that you opened the talk with I was. I'd never heard that term before but then during the talk I was struck that that both the blockchain and the the Taobao guy that you profiled both of those it seemed to be where the idea had sort of generated in the city and then come to the to the periphery. So, with Metro normativity, do you see these top of the list and other things as sort of a challenge to Metro normativity itself or is that more just sort of your, your frame of your sort of your sort of research program of going to the countryside. I think it was a really, it was a helpful framing for me, I think too. So, you know, the Metro normativity part I became interested in, especially, there's this organization called Queer Appalachia. And, you know, I started getting really interested in it because, especially during like the 2016 election right it was this narrative of like, oh, rural people like everyone is in rural areas is, you know, white and, you know, poor and XYZ right. So, I actually became interested in like challenges to this through representation. So Queer Appalachia they're like actually no like queer folks live in the countryside and like just there's not like people don't write about them right and actually that representation is important for like survival and for community right to like normalize that, you know, it isn't just like X coal minors. And I think too for me the spirit really carried through the research because knowing was kind of like weird OMA fascination with the countryside like gee golly farmers know how to press buttons like that's super problematic and wanting to keep that spirit. Through the research through also the way that I was talking to people. You know, making it like much more an ethnographic account than like, you know, there's another part of my brain when I started off writing the book where I was like it would be cool to have like all these maps and like exploded diagrams and all these things. But actually then just veering away from that way of looking in general. Thank you. We have one more question in the chat box from Sarah modestly. Thank you for a wonderful talk. I was wondering, do any of these Taobao villages see normal retail, or is it limited to e commerce. So it's entirely e commerce and through the when I was talking about the rural villagers as consumers. Like when you go into these villages, everything is like a courier like brought these things to you. And you go to the grocery store and they'll have like different stuff, depending on the day that you're there, like it's clearly not the like Cisco food systems we come like very regularly we always have the same things. It's just like whatever they decided to buy from the internet that week. And they're like request things. It's very it's this like thing where you're just like we're all just like material beings that are like flows for e commerce and like mobile payment like none of this feels real in a sense but is also real. I guess I just have like one last really short question which is that you know kind of we have this. And maybe you've mentioned it this kind of this understanding that like rural China is significantly poorer than residents in urban areas do you think that kind of despite the precarity of these Taobao villages that they are in fact kind of overall the precarity of life in some you know material senses from, you know, then before. I mean definitely. I think the successful ones have really really changed. I mean, the village has become like a town, basically. And they're able to rent. So a huge thing similar here is like they've had a hard time keeping teachers previously because teachers are like I don't want to live in middle of nowhere where I like don't have access to anything cool. And now a lot of these places, they're able to have like a more robust education system. And so it is changing that dynamic a lot a lot more that next generation can like, you know, have a different life. Okay, so I we have a question from Savannah. Thank you for your talk. What are you working on next and what are some resources to understand this changing landscape. Yeah, so I have to admit that in some bizarre way and I'd be curious for others who like to research in China. I, my resources are mainly like reading articles on we chat but also specifically like these large like, like 200 person we chat groups like I got roped into one with like some people from the Alibaba Rural Development Institute, and it's just like please let me out of here because there's like some really weird, you know, like, they're like hawkish about rural development across the world. And sometimes it takes on like a really nationalistic tone that is very uncomfortable, but those are generally my resources because I find a lot of the official more like, you know, I think sixth tone has a good amount of like rural China coverage, but they are like a state sponsored newspaper so oftentimes it's like very like yay everything's great. In terms of what I'm working on next. I'm working on passing my qualifying exams. That's about it. Thank you so much for your talk. I think, you know, I speak for many of us who found this like quite fascinating you took us on a, on a trip to the other side of the world and do a place that is just not, you know, I don't think I knew all of this was happening and I personally look forward to reading your book. Thank you so much for taking the time to come here and speak to us today. As for everyone else on behalf of G SAP and the urban planning program in particular like to thank you all for attending. Please make sure to join us next week at the same time for our next lips talk by Dr. Thank you so much for your lecture at the University of Cambridge, who will be discussing the topic of cities on the move on turbulent urbanism of irregular migration.