Xiaowei Wang’s multifaceted interests and aptitudes coalesce at the intersection of tech, ecology, and community empowerment. Their practice of ‘seeing geographically’ means coming to deeply understand place and the many interrelationships that link our world and transcend the artificial boundaries separating nations, people, and ideas. Against a backdrop of global anxiety over the unfathomable pace of technological development, Xiaowei journeyed to rural China to explore how it is being transformed, rebuilt, and inextricably connected to the rest of the world. They show that rural China is neither a backwater nor a periphery. On the contrary, from the industry on display in so-called Taobao Villages, to the bizarre ingenuity of the Blockchain Chicken Farm that gives its name to their book, Xiaowei discovered a truly progressive and potentially self-sufficient approach to tech development, where hardware is easily repairable and software is open source – a possible model for democratising technology so that it is truly by and for the people.