i’ve started doing preliminary interviews with youth who are from villages and are now residing in Beijing. I’m trying to get a better understanding of the different ways that youth use ICTs in their village before coming to the city.

Ultimately my research in Wuhan will focus on ICT usage in the city, but I think it’s important that I am able to situate urban ICT usage in a larger context and one that includes rural ICT usage since the migrants I speak to will all be from the countryside.

I’ve been speaking to Beimeng (named changed), an 18 year female who is now studying in Beijing. We were hanging out on the subway talking about her home, a village with a population of 3,000  in Dongei. Her family is financially stable and considered to be me more well off than others. Her mother is a school teacher and her father is a truck driver.

Their family just installed broadband at the beginning of this year. I asked her what it was like to have internet at home. She told me that it was “nice” but no one is really home that often. She is now living in the city, her mom is always at work, and her dad is usually gone for weeks at a time driving his truck.

Since people aren’t home very often, I asked if they were still going to keep paying for the service.  Beimeng said that they definitely plan on keeping it because they plan on surveillancing their fertilizer through the internet. I thought that I had misheard or mis-translated some word - but indeed Beimeng was talking about fertilizer.

Like many other villages, the introduction of fertilizers has changed life in Xiheyuancun Village (pseudonym). The village is now considered prosperous with great crop yields. Beimeng’s family is able to purchase high-end fertilizer. Their family is known for having some of the best fertilizer in the village so people often steal their fertilizer. A few years ago, they installed a camera surveillance system where they could monitor the fertilizer from inside their home.

But none of their family members are home that often. As a result, they will stream the surveillance of their fertilizer over the Internet so that they can keep an eye on it from anywhere they can get online. I asked her where and with with her and her family would most likely use to check the video stream. She said that she would most likely take a look from the internet cafes or her cellphone. Her father would only check in on the fertilizer through his cellphone because he is usually on the road. As for her mom, she would most likely be the person who will consistently keep an eye on the camera feed from her work computer at school.

i find this story fascinating for many reasons.

1.) it’s an example of how rural-urban migrant populations keep ties to their village. For Beimeng, she still felt very involved in the family process of monitoring the fertilizer.

2. ) use of technology in a context specific this village. Streaming video as a form of surveillancing is an old idea. Security guard firms to doggy day care centers do it.   Yet here we have an individual farming family using the internet to monitor their fertilizer, which is a very contextually specific idea.

3.) this story is indicative of the level of trust and intimacy in the village. Beimeng was telling me that as a child, the village was more poor but her mom said that robbery was not a problem.

4.) I find it interesting that they installed the internet,  realized that no one really used it, yet still found a way to make it useful for their mobile lives.

5.) Beimeng said that her father (truck driver)  would check in through his cellphone (using the mobile internet) and her mother would check in through her work computer. This point illustrates the increasing differences that we will see in how people use the internet versus mobile internet. Beimeng’s father is a truck driver, so relies on his mobile. But her mother has a stationary job with constant access to her work computer.

6.) we tend to think of the only entity that uses the internet to monitor activities is the government (esp. in China), but in this case we have an individual household who has decided to use it as a monitoring device

7..) This is a story very specific to China’s countryside as land reforms in the late 70’s the give every individual household  a plot of land. With parceled plots, this means that families can make choices about what and how to plant the land. Families  who can afford high-grade fertilizer, like Beimeng’s, can keep making more money. Within one village, there can be a lot of class distinctions—with fertilizer being one of the markers of class in this story.

I plan on visiting Beimeng’s village next year after they’ve installed the streaming fertilizer surveillance monitoring systems. It will be exciting to talk to her parents about how they check in online.

Now off on a totally different track - Fertilizer is a critical part of modern China’s history. China’s and US’s modern history starts with fertilizer - one of the agreements that came out of the famous 1972 Nixon visit is that China placed an order for 13 fertilzer factories from Cargill.