Wu Peng, a bank employee in Beijing walked into a fresh food store after work and stopped by the "running chickens" section.

He took a closer look at the labels and it had claimed that each chicken had walked more than 1 million steps and was guaranteed to be free range.

"He noticed a ring with a QR code attached to the foot of the chicken, he scanned it, and got all the information about the specifications, manufacturer, birth date, inspection and factory report, and the delivery time of the chicken," as per ChinAfrica.

"It's very common to use QR codes to transmit information," Peng told ChinAfrica. "However, what is difficult is to ascertain the authenticity of such information."

Blockchain solves this, and as a result, rural agricultural communities across mainland China are able to sell their '1 million step' chickens at three times the market price.

In 2023, the rural mountainous village of Xijiang Miao in mainland China (pictured above), received 4.6 million tourists.

To put this into perspective, Serbia only received 2.4 million foreign visitors in 2024.

Though over 25 years ago, the village was an isolated and impoverished traditional agricultural community nestled among terraced rice fields where horses were often used to carry goods up its narrow paths.

In 2000, over 400 million rural residents lived under the poverty line in China with hundreds of thousands of rural villages similar to Xijiang scattered across the mainland.

So I hope this this paints a clearer picture of the challenge the Chinese government faced and how extraordinary this achievement really is.

"We must take the blockchain as an important breakthrough for independent innovation of core technologies." - Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2019.

The Chinese government has always maintained a prohibitive attitude towards cryptocurrency, though its approach to blockchain technology is one of embracement as part of its state capacity.

In 2018, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) published a handbook titled 'Blockchain  —  A Guide for Officials' targeted at government officials and financial authorities to gain a deeper understanding of blockchain technology.

More recently in 2023, China established a national blockchain research center in Beijing with the goal of training at least 500,000 blockchain professionals. For comparison, there are currently only about 31,000 active blockchain developers worldwide, according to data from the Developer Report website.

An important side note though, China's implementation of blockchain technology is usually centralised and bureaucratic, used as a tool for oversight rather than individual liberation and decentralisation as intended by the founding cypherpunks.

Nonetheless, it is clear China has a great interest in pursuing the development of the technology.

In 2013, the Chinese leadership launched its Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) program that aimed to eradicate extreme poverty by 2020 through delivering tailored socio-economic aid to its most vulnerable.

The primary goal of TPA is to identify those in poverty alongside "other relevant data of poverty causes, such as savings, medical care [and] tax" according to research published by Beijing Jiaotong University.

"'Targeted' means standardised proceduces and individualised programs to bring each poor family out of poverty." said R.L. Kuhn, an American investment banker and long-time observer of Chinese policy, in an interview with CGTN.

"I was startled to discover that every poor family in China has its own file. That's millions of poor families, each with its own customised plan, each checked monthly, and digitised for central compilation and analysis."

As chickens cluck and roam the fields of Sanqiao, Guizhou in southwest China, every step is tracked by a pedometer and uploaded to the blockchain alongside other information such as the chicken's age and time of death.

Demand comes from middle-class consumers who are happy to pay for quality and peace of mind.

“The aim is to solve the lack of trust by allowing consumers to see the source of their food,” says Wang Wei, chief operating officer of Lianmo Technology, a subsidiary of ZhongAn Technology that worked on GoGo Chicken.

A stated goal of the GoGo Chicken program is to help raise rural incomes.

The program has already enlisted farms in Guizhou, Anhui, Shandong, and Henan provinces, and plans to expand further across the mountainous regions of southwestern China according to SixthTone.

In 2016, Alibaba’s fintech arm, Ant Financial Services Group collaborated with the China Social Assistance Foundation to use blockchain technology in a small experiment to raise money for ten hearing-impaired children.

The test quickly generated 198,400 RMB ($29,560) from fifty thousand donors, as per Candid.

Later in 2017, Ant Financial and the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation launched an insurance scheme that was set to provide health coverage to millions allowing applicants to submit insurance claims based on blockchain technology, as per CGTN.

As we know, poor healthcare is a major cause of poverty, especially among rural agricultural communities.

Fast forward to 2021, and more than 1 million people worldwide use Alibaba's "Each Person Three Hours" platform which lists over 4,000 charities and nonprofit organisations.

The platform uses blockchain technology to help record all donations made by its users, updating the funds and project statuses in real-time, as per Alizila, Alibaba's news network.

In 2016, the Guizhou province established an investment fund of 300 billion RMB ($43 billion) as part of the CCP's wider Targeted Poverty Alleviation program.

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) in collaboration with Guizhou Guimin Investment Group Co. Ltd. (GGIGC), officially launched a blockchain management platform for the fund, as per ChinAfrica.

The ICBC in an official news report on July 2021 said they established the blockchain-powered platform "to solve the 'transparency' and 'precision' problems in government fund appropriation".

"The platform realizes thorough fund appropriation, provides a new model for oversight of government funds, and effectively supports the building of a clean, transparent government."

A public welfare, peer-to-peer microfinance scheme called YiNongDai, a subsidiary of Beijing financial services group CreditEase, connects high-net worth Chinese lenders with rural farmers in China's poorest regions.

YiNongDai integrates blockchain technology to record each loan on the platform, allowing users to track their 'loan trends' in real time, according to ChinAfrica.

"These people need a small loan to support them to do planting or open a mammy-pappy store… But they cannot get financial services from the banks because they are poor and do not have any credit records. This platform helps farmers to change their lives" said Selina Xu at CreditEase.

Loans typically start from as little as 100 RMB ($14.18) up to 20,000 RMB ($2,835).

Each farmer has a profile with a photo and a brief description of their situation, which is put together by "cooperatives on the ground," according to Euromoney as "many recipients can’t read or write, much less use the internet."

Then lenders browse through the platform and match with someone they would like to lend to.

“Most lenders are our clients. They have wealth and they want to help others, but they don’t know how. We built this platform to make a connection.” said Selina Xu.

"So far, 200,000 farmers have been funded in this way," as of February 2019.

"For national rejuvenation, rural rejuvenation is a must." - Chinese President Xi Jingping in 2022.

When it comes to the real-world implementation of blockchain technology it is hard to come to the conclusion that the West is on par with China.

While Wall Street is preoccupied with figuring out how to financialise cryptocurrency to make the rich richer, the CCP is busy pursuing the development of a technology whose birthplace has brushed it away.

The cypherpunks, the pioneers of the blockchain, envisioned a decentralised, autonomous society where privacy is embedded in its social construct with technologies like the blockchain serving as its means.

On the other hand, China has embodied the blockchain as part of its state capacity, an instrument for policy, and tool for societal development rather than for an ideological pursuit.

Needless to say, the financial autonomy and development that China has achieved for its hundreds of millions of rural citizens with the help from technology like the blockchain is unprecedented and raises questions for the West on its direction and ethusiasm on such technology.

The president of the United States of America, Donald Trump launched his own memecoin in 2025, while president Xi Jingping of China has lifted 98 million rural residents out of poverty since he came to power in 2012.

Header cover: A worker at a breeding base in Wuyi County, Hebei Province, monitors chicken on June 26, 2019 (Photo: XINHUA)