Abstract
This chapter examines urban-to-rural migration in China with an account of independent organic farmers who leave the city to establish farms in the countryside. Using thick description, the chapter traces three independent organic farmers’ journey and examines what happens when they arrive at their new homes. Cody engages with social poetics theory—the use of metaphor and stereotypes in social interaction—to explore farmers’ different experiences locating land, living in villages, working on farms, hiring locals and trying to ‘fit in.’ “The Farm” includes an examination of the cultural, economic and social capital of farmers versus rural neighbours and discusses how this impacts farmers’ indecisiveness regarding whether to adopt, reinvent or replace rural cultural practices.
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Notes
- 1.
Before 2009, access to Chongming Island was limited to ferry services that were susceptible to bad weather, especially during Shanghai’s rainy season. Their frequency was often interrupted, which made it difficult for businesses in Chongming Island to service the Shanghai mainland market. In 2009, however, a 26-kilometre-long bridge project connected Chongming Island with Shanghai’s eastern Pudong district. This coincided with the island’s designation as a key strategic district in Shanghai for sustainable development (Zhou and Shen 2011). Just under 1400 square kilometres in size, only 40 percent of the island is planned for urban development; the remainder is designated for agricultural or wetland use and subsidies are available for farmers, including organic farmers (Chang and Sheppard 2013). In addition to improvements in accessibility, a door-to-door courier industry (known as kuaidi, meaning ‘fast delivery’) emerged in China in the 2000s. This industry comprised approximately 35,000 firms by 2013 (Mir 2013), enabling the daily delivery of billions of small parcels across the nation, making the regular delivery of farmers’ organic produce direct to customers in the city feasible. Independent organic farms in Chongming Island were among the first to utilise this service extensively, as delivery from Chongming Island to Shanghai city is cheap and in high demand. A box of organic produce three to four kilograms in weight, for example, only costs between CNY 8 to CNY 15 per delivery.
- 2.
This is an arrangement known as tegong (特供, literally ‘special-supply’, short for tegong nongchang [特工农场], or ‘special-supply farm’). These are farms that exclusively supply a particular company or work-unit. Tegong farms are a legacy of the Mao era and the urban work-unit (Demick 2011). Many still exist in the twenty-first century and supply senior leaders of the CCP (Osnos 2011). Amongst many ordinary Chinese citizens, they are symbols of corruption and institutionalised inequality with regard to access to safe food.
- 3.
Three other independent organic farmers partner with rural residents: Zhuling from Canxian Farm, Zhiquan from Mengke Farm and Old Du from Duoyan Farm. Their partnerships do not include the sharing of financial responsibilities or revenues, however; they are more a case of the organic farmer seeking and finding a reliable rural resident to oversee the farm’s operations, planting schedules and other rural workers. In addition, these three organic farmers tap into their rural partner’s rich agricultural knowledge and learn, to take one example, about crop seasonality from them.
- 4.
Liu Shan purchased other books for Jiang Shifu to read, including Essential Techniques for the Welfare of the People (Qimin Yaoshu 齐民要术) an agricultural text from the sixth century; The Wang Family from Eastern Shandong’s Agricultural Book (Donglu Wangshi Nongshu 东魯王氏农书); an agricultural text from the fourteenth century; and Materia Medica for Successful Dietary Therapy (Shiliao Bencao 食疗本草), an early dietary work from the eighth or ninth century.
- 5.
Mahota Farm is perhaps the most successful organic farm in terms of achieving what Liu Shan is trying to do at Chuantong Farm. Mahota Farm is a large Singapore-owned organic farm in Chongming Island and part of a large business conglomerate that has interests in golf courses, retail outlets and schools across China. Dr. Lin Zongxian, Mahota’s Director of Agriculture and a retired Professor of Agriculture from National Taiwan University, meticulously attempts to implement agricultural knowledge he obtains from old Chinese texts into the farm’s daily practices and among local farm staff. Mahota Farm is very popular among Shanghai’s upper middle-classes and elite consumers.
- 6.
Because of its quaint appearance and convenient location, a number of grassroots sustainability initiatives selected Puceng Village as their base in the late 1990s. This included an organic agriculture NGO. Through their activities, a large number of urban residents had the opportunity to visit Puceng Village. Another NGO at the same time began conducting recycling activities there. They collected truckloads of used ground coffee from chain-stores in Shanghai city, such as Starbucks, and regularly left it in large piles across one of the village’s public fields, to be later sorted and distributed across a number of compost heaps. A number of my visits to Puceng Village during the autumn and winter of 2013 are intimately connected with the unmistakably strong fragrance of coffee permeating the air.
- 7.
Ayi (阿姨) means Auntie and is a respectful term of address for all unrelated females older than oneself.
- 8.
I was surprised to learn that there could be quite a lot of negativity toward rural residents among movement protagonists. Bihua from Ailan Farm, for example, is especially scathing. She calls her local neighbours ‘stupid (hen ben)’ because many replaced their agricultural crops with trees to take advantage of government subsidies and the large market for fast-growing tall trees. These trees are purchased from rural residents and moved to the gardens and green spaces of newly built residential complexes in the city, a fast and cost-effective way to beautify the environment. As more and more rural residents replaced their crops with trees, supply exceeded demand and prices fell sharply. Many rural residents are still left with fields of trees they are unable to sell.
- 9.
From the local villager’s point of view, this arrangement is highly attractive. Qian et al. (2013) argue that a decline in agricultural productivity and income, combined with their own perception that local government deliberately excludes the village from the processes and benefits of modernisation, led them to adopt aggressive rent-seeking behaviours. They can earn an annual income of up to RMB 20,000 from the increasing population of artists and students who move to Xiaozhou, far more than they can earn from agriculture. Most of this income is from the letting of housing, which became so prevalent that the Village Committee stepped in to manage the process. This convenient and streamlined arrangement further encourages more urbanites to migrate to Xiaozhou. Local cultural and economic conditions in Xiaozhou such as these illustrate the important influence rural residents have in shaping and framing the rural experience of urban migrants.
- 10.
I met many new villagers in Puceng Village. Let me paint a picture of two: Qingwa Baba and Qingwa Mama (青蛙爸爸 and 青蛙妈妈, literally Daddy Frog and Mummy Frog). They are a Taiwanese couple in their early 60s who settled in Puceng Village in 2010 in semi-retirement. Their eccentric nicknames are the result of Qingwa Baba’s work as a landscape architect responsible for the design of ecological enclosures for reptiles and frogs. The front of the old house they rent and renovated in Puceng Village has been gorgeously redesigned as a miniature ecological garden and is itself home to hundreds of frogs.
- 11.
The example of quarterly pregnancy testing is illustrative. Once every three months, the village doctor is responsible for ensuring that all married women who have not reached menopause are pregnancy tested as part of the state’s birth control policy. When a number of women failed to show up on time, the urban official who was supervising criticised them as untrustworthy and backward. The local doctor, usually a ‘confident and earthly man’—suggesting that he was at least somewhat sympathetic to peasant concerns—had no choice but to go along with the official’s anti-peasant position as he too is a party member (Kipnis 1997, p. 129).
- 12.
Jeffrey Pilcher (2008) depicts bourgeois peasantness using the example of the Mexican tortilla. While mechanisation ensures Mexican wage labourers can still afford tortillas, it is only the wealthier middle-classes who are able to purchase the traditional (and now more expensive) hand-made fare. Pilcher sympathises with the wage labourers. He notes the irony of the Slow Food and other similar food movements that celebrate regional artisan foods yet exclude the very people who rely on them.
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Cody, S. (2019). The Farm. In: Exemplary Agriculture. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3795-6_6
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