A look at Taobao Villages an ecological change.
- Mobile payments have been a key driver of e-commerce in China, facilitating "trust-less" transactions and decreased friction in business payments.
- Such platforms and technical infrastructure have been especially prominent in rural China, given government run and private rural development programs. Often, the private rural development programs outpace or come into tension with government run ones.
- Food security and farming depends on a large rural population, many on smallholder farms
- Yield is now correlated to compensation (shifting to "socialist marketbased")
- Manual labor is needed to maintain and upkeep these farms
- Increase in manual labor, increase in farm health?