Xiaowei Wang

Xiaowei Wang (they/them) is a writer, artist and researcher. They are a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, lead steward of Logic School, an organizing community for tech workers, and the author of Blockchain Chicken Farm.

Abstract:

This paper explores the chili pepper industry within Guizhou and how it intersects with a push towards high-tech, digital agriculture schemes, alongside Guizhou’s economic development driven by a data economy. State bureaus, tech companies and research institutes around rural development cast digital, data-driven agriculture as a broadly positive development that will provide environmental sustainability and economic benefits to small farmers. In examining Guizhou’s Chili Pepper City I argue that such initiatives maintain state power through accelerating complexity and implementation of universalizing technologies. In the context of Guizhou, these universalizing technologies are intertwined with a legacy of China’s own settler colonial dynamics, the political uses of poverty alleviation and environmentalism to control land, and socialist legacies of using agricultural modernization towards nationalist ends.