Why Entrepreneurship Flourishes in The Countryside | Xiaowei R. Wang | TED

So what you're seeing here are pearl ponds in rural Zhejiang.

And on the day that I visited,

the owner of these ponds was surprised that anyone outside of her town,

let alone the pearl farming business,

would want to know more about these ponds.

70 percent of the world's pearls are cultured and produced here.

And so each of these mussels, they contain 40 to 50 pearls.

And the higher end ones are taken out, sold as jewelry,

and the lower end pearls are actually extracted,

put into smaller oysters, vacuum sealed, preserved in formaldehyde

and shipped off all the way to places like rural Indiana

for online pearl parties

where thousands of people sit

watching these oysters being cracked open in real time.

Online pearl parties are truly an internet-enabled phenomena,

growing out of platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Because on the internet,

no one can tell just how bad these oysters smell.

(Laughter)

When we think of tech, we often think of cities.

Places like San Francisco or Shenzhen,

where tech is built and visibly part of everyday life.

Rarely do we think of the countryside,

and when we do, it's as a place that's lacking tech,

that's lacking digital media literacy,

and we see the rural as backward.

Yet the pearl-producing towns of Zhejiang

and places in rural Indiana,

where online pearl parties flourish,

they don't just exist as an afterthought,

waiting to become cities one day.

As online pearl parties show,

rural China and rural America are connected in unexpected ways.

And these connections need to be more than ones of economic growth.

There's numerous stories like this.

Whether it's rural families manufacturing for online lifestyle brands in the US

or influencers in rural China

cashing in by making livestream videos of themselves pulling noodles,

eating chili peppers, picking tea and, my favorite, hunting bamboo rats.

There's whole pockets of e-commerce,

whether on Amazon or Taobao,

that are sourced from rural manufacturers in China,

made by families.

So this one family workshop that I visited was fairly typical,

with a husband and wife making Halloween costumes for export,

while the 90-year-old matriarch looked on,

sifting through plastic packaging for shipping.

And across the US and China, I've seen similar dynamics:

rural areas becoming home to data centers,

e-commerce warehouses, rare earth mines.

And ...

also top-down entrepreneurship initiatives,

like this free range chicken farmer that I met,

who is using chicken biometrics tracking and blockchain

to improve supply chain transparency.

At a larger scale, rural areas are connected

through global market forces.

Whether it's soybeans grown in Brazil,

shipped all the way to industrial hog farms in southern China

or America's biggest pork player, Smithfield,

being acquired by a Chinese pork company.

And even the process of hog farming itself is becoming high tech.

NetEase, one of the world's largest online gaming companies,

now has its own hog farms,

and Alibaba, the internet giant,

is now partnering with farms to use AI and computer vision

in order to create a highly optimized pig.

Because the idea being,

AI and computer vision will help scale up pork production to an unprecedented level,

meeting the demands of a rising middle class.

So what happens when tech and the countryside intersect?

Well, in my travels, I’ve talked to owners of large farms

who see their work as one of inputs, outputs, land value and land ownership.

I've also talked to small farmers

who frame their work as one of ecology and stewardship.

That their land is a place of relations.

It's exactly this ecological framing

that reminds us that to see and understand the countryside

is a crucial part of moving towards a more livable future for everyone.

Because the tech that we imagine as urbanites to be solutions,

things like online coding classes for farmers

or, you know, factory work in cities,

all of these are still framed as one-way relationships,

with tech supposedly benefiting rural areas.

But when we think of something

like AI farming pigs at an unprecedented scale

or small farmers turning their land into pearl ponds,

it's not because tech has found a solution.

These small farmers turn their land into pearl ponds

because they can't compete at a global scale against industrial farms

who are using automation, chemicals and pesticides.

So tracing these moments in rural tech

reveals how so much of the technology we do build

centers our consumption and our entertainment in cities.

Besides,

some of the most thoughtful, careful innovation

is not happening in a place like Silicon Valley or San Francisco,

but in places outside of them.

Like Yangguang, a rice farming village four hours outside of Guangzhou.

For years, the local agricultural bureau had worked with farmers

to implement chemical fertilizers,

chemical pesticides, industrial farm machinery.

And so they did this, and they noticed a decline in their soil quality

under these modern protocols.

So the villagers took things into their own hands.

So they do rice farming, and rice farming is mountain terraced.

So it’s a form of natural irrigation, with water flowing from top to bottom.

The village changed their governance structure

so that stewardship of the rice paddies would change every few years

via a lottery system,

which also meant you wouldn't have contiguous paddies.

So if you sprayed pesticides or dammed off water at the top,

you might be affecting yours or your neighbor's paddy lower down.

They also started practicing organic farming

and building their own farm machinery with the help of local blacksmiths.

They also started selling their rice online.

And while tech helped this village steward their land,

it was really people, not tech, at the helm of decision-making.

And so it's exactly this approach,

without boundaries, without ambitions to scale,

that reminds us of the humility and innovation,

its ability to change political and social structures.

We have to see the tech that we build as affecting a set of relations,

ecologies and environments.

Because innovation in this village is literally an ecosystem,

one that doesn’t scale across thousands of users

but across the spectrum of time,

regenerating the soil and community ties from one planting season to the next.

And for that, you don't need a legion of engineers,

millions of users or VC funding.

Thank you.

(Applause)