Exemplary Agriculture

Independent Organic Farming in Contemporary China

Sacha Cody

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9789811337949
• eBook ISBN: 9789811337956
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Agribusiness
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is an important contribution to our understanding of food in China through an ethnographic case study of an alternative food movement in Shanghai and the surrounding countryside. Cody examines a group of middle-class urban residents who move to the countryside to establish small-scale and independent organic farms. The book explores the complex relationships movement protagonists have with customers in the city, rural neighbours in the countryside, volunteers on their farms, intellectuals involved in rural reconstruction initiatives as well as the organic items they produce. In doing so, Cody provides valuable insights into the urban/rural dichotomy and questions of morality in China today. This book speaks to several concerns associated with the accelerated modernization China and other Asian nations are experiencing, including food safety and class relations. It will appeal to scholars and practitioners across a range of fields including anthropology, food studies, rural development and China Studies.

© The Author(s) 2019

Sacha CodyExemplary Agriculturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3795-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Sacha Cody¹

(1)

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

Sacha Cody

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

‘In China, it takes longer to reach the countryside these days.’ So said Old Shen as we drove toward his organic farm on the outskirts of the Shanghai municipality. Old Shen pointed out all the new and wider roads, residential areas, and commercial districts and facilities we passed. ‘Only a few years earlier this urban area was all fields. Now the farmers don’t farm anymore!’ he exclaimed. These taken for granted definitions of what constitutes the urban—visible infrastructure and, as farmers left their villages and moved into new residential areas, denser high-rise populations—were enough to give Old Shen the impression that the city was replacing the countryside, leading to a feeling of greater distance between his apartment in downtown Shanghai and his organic farm.

The scene we saw that day—and the narrative Old Shen attached to it—is a familiar one across China; sprawling areas of commercial and residential development are replacing what were once fields worked by farmers. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, at the beginning of the reform era in 1978, China’s urban population stood at 172 million people, or 18 percent of the population. By 2015, this figure had increased to 771 million people, or 56 percent of the population.¹ Over the same time period, employment in agriculture declined from 82 to 28 percent of the working population (World Bank 2015). These broad trends are expected to continue. At the Nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in October 2017, President Xi Jinping outlined two centennial goals intended to facilitate the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ (Xi 2017, p. 51); to build a moderately prosperous society and wipe out poverty by 2021 (the 100th anniversary of the CCP) and to turn China into a fully developed nation by 2049 (the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China). Xi’s speech reminds us that urbanisation and agricultural industrialisation are central to these goals:

We will create networks of cities and towns based on city clusters, enabling the coordinated development of cities of different sizes and small towns, and speed up work on granting permanent urban residency to people who move from rural to urban areas. (Xi 2017, pp. 28–29)

We must ensure China’s food security so that we always have control over our own food supply. We will establish industrial, production, and business operation systems for modern agriculture, and improve the systems for supporting and protecting agriculture. We will develop appropriately scaled agricultural operations of various forms, cultivate new types of agribusiness, improve specialized agricultural services, and encourage small household farmers to become involved in modern agriculture. (Xi 2017, p. 28)

As this book will show, this official narrative of Chinese modernity conceals alternative aspirations and wishes found among ordinary Chinese citizens as they pertain to urban/rural spatial considerations as well as food provisioning practices and ideologies. Old Zheng, Liu Shan and Shang Mei (Old Shen’s wife)—three urbanites you will get to know intimately throughout this book—will be our window into some of these alternative narratives. They left their life in the city and moved to the countryside. They painstakingly set up independent and small-scale organic farms by renting land one mu at a time—one mu is ¹/₁₅ of a hectare, or just over 666 square metres—from rural residents, many of whom were either no longer farming or farming in a limited capacity; they were therefore happy for the rental income they received. In the process these three urbanites built a new life for themselves and their families as small-scale and independent organic farmers in the countryside, a life quite different from that encapsulated in Xi’s speech above.

In this book I introduce and critically analyse the grassroots and alternative food movement in Shanghai, China and the surrounding countryside that Old Zheng, Liu Shan and Shang Mei are part of. My core argument is that members of China’s urban middle-classes—such as these three individuals—influence how urban modernity is both conceptualised and experienced through role-modelling an alternative narrative concerning the politics of urban/rural relations and food provisioning practices and ideologies. This alternative narrative believes that the countryside and rural Chinese culture has something intrinsic to itself that is of value to a Chinese modernity preoccupied with the city. Intimately connected to this alternative narrative are original and unexpected interpretations of farming, land and rurality as well as enduring legacies of a socialist past. These factors come together and interact with contemporary processes of globalisation—notably contemporary consumer culture—and produce political, social, cultural and economic tensions that are also witnessed elsewhere around the world yet at the same time contain characteristics unique to China.

I call the grassroots and alternative food movement that promotes this alternative narrative exemplary agriculture. At the centre of exemplary agriculture is a group of independent and small-scale organic farmers including Old Zheng, Liu Shan and Shang Mei. These farmers—exemplary agriculturalists, or as I often call them throughout this book, Shanghai’s independent organic farmers—move to the countryside with limited agricultural experience and produce organic grains, vegetables, poultry eggs and local delicacies. They shuffle back and forth between tending to their organic farms in the countryside and cultivating a customer base in the city. Exemplary agriculturalists worry about the health—physical and psychological—of urban Chinese individuals, families and society and want to improve it by providing alternatives. On one level, through the medium of organic food, they want to relieve the food safety anxiety Chinese urbanites suffer. At a deeper level, they want to equip urban residents with tools to cope with the pressures of city living and China’s ongoing modernisation project. Adopting practices derived from rural culture to facilitate alternative and better ways of city living, exemplary agriculturalists persuade others to emulate them.

Food is the central medium through which exemplary agriculturalists seek social change. Indeed, while food is essential to human existence, the study of food can illuminate a wide range of social processes and topics of interest to anthropology and the social sciences beyond its biological necessity. Since the 1980s, anthropological interest in food has increased. Jakob Klein (2014) notes that this increase is partly the result of the publication of Cooking, Cuisine and Class: a study in comparative sociology by the anthropologist Jack Goody (1982). Goody challenged what was the dominant mode of anthropological inquiry into food at the time—symbolic analysis—by showing the intimate relationship between food and the rest of culture.² This change in perspective and approach facilitated an enormous number of topics to be studied through a food lens. Sidney Mintz and Christine Du Bois (2002), for example, show how food studies inform discussions and debates concerning social change, inequality and insecurity, and ritual and identity as well as provide raw material for classic ethnographic research, single commodity studies and instructional materials.

This book explores a number of these topics—especially social change, inequality and identity—yet it also explores new and exciting territory. James Watson and Melissa Caldwell (2005, p. 137) suggest that ‘Perhaps the newest and most promising trajectory in the anthropology of food is that offered by the study of state socialism and postsocialism.’ Furthermore, they believe that the ‘organic revolution’ is an area that must ‘command attention for the next phase of food research’ (Watson and Caldwell 2005, p. 172). This book attempts to rise to this challenge and fill a gap in the scholarship and literature with an account of independent organic farming in postsocialist China. As the following pages and chapters will show, this fascinating topic provides a window into questions, debates and discussions concerning the nature of Chinese society in the twenty-first century such as the nature of public activism, the role of new economic classes in initiating change, class relations between urban and rural residents, the character of Chinese consumerism, and more.

Food is a unique lens to analyse these questions because it has always been an intimate part of social life and social relations in China. Where one is seated at a formal banquet or casual dinner, what is served and in what order, what guests are offered inside private homes and what families cook for each other all contribute significantly to the sense of self and network of relationships one has within Chinese society. As Eugene Anderson (1988, p. 246) concludes in his comprehensive discussion of food in China over the centuries, ‘As a marker of social status, ritual status, special occasions, and other social facts, food became less a source of nutrients than a means of communication.’

Today, following four decades of reform and opening up policies (gaige kaifang), the urban Chinese consumer has an abundance of choice with regard to where and how to acquire food as well as what to eat. From commercial retail spaces (supermarkets, hypermarkets, specialty stores and convenience stores), restaurants (many cuisines and price ranges), traditional markets (wet and outdoor fresh produce markets) and online channels (with home delivery), urban Chinese consumers are spoilt for choice. Moreover, the popularity of organic food, produced without chemical pesticides and fertilisers, has increased significantly in the twenty-first century as large numbers of urban Chinese seek healthier and safer choices. The organic food market in China is certainly not without its problems. And while it appears marginal—organic food accounts for only one percent of total food consumption in China (Wright 2015)—it has grown exponentially in the last ten years. Part of this growth is linked to China’s status as the world’s fourth largest producer of organic food, behind the US, Germany and France (Heinze 2016). While much of this is for export, it is increasingly being channeled for domestic consumption. Concurrent with these developments, life in the countryside and organic farming lifestyles can appear attractive when compared with problems in the city such as pollution, crowding and ill health.

In the US, UK and Europe, alternative...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Class Relations and Exemplarity
• Part II. Exemplary Agriculture in the Countryside and the City
• 10. Conclusion
• Back Matter