1 Ecological Farming as an Alternative
At the Beijing Farmersâ Market, slogans praising farmers adorn the flags at the entrance, the welcome blackboard, and the booth shades: âecological farmers come to the city for peopleâs convenience,â âcome to know ecological farmers, your food producers,â and âfeel rooted from the bottom of your heart by knowing where your food comes from.â Contrary to conventional conceptualizations of the Chinese rural as repressed or rendered invisible in relation to the urban processes globalization is primarily associated with (Rozelle and Hell), China is currently witnessing the rise of a more positive image of the rural in the urban (Griffiths et al.; Cody 2018). One illustration of this is the Beijing Farmersâ Market. The farmers there are presented as ecologically producing food that can help urbanites feel rooted as well as safe. Through alternative agricultural practices based in the rural, they seek to reweave humansâ attachments to nonhumans and the ecosystem as a whole, responding to capitalist as well as environmental crises that transcend geographical and species boundaries. This chapter investigates the ecologically focused imagination of rurality that is constructed and circulated around the Beijing Farmersâ Market,
In the past decades, a series of food-safety crises have prompted Chinaâs transformation into a ârisk societyâ (Beck; Yan), organized around the fear of uncontrollable risks.1 Some poisonous food additives and agrichemicals, like carmine dye for coloring unripe strawberries, are illegally applied because they improve foodâs appearance, enabling it to be sold at higher prices. In addition, the depletion of soil and water resources increasingly jeopardizes the quality and quantity of Chinaâs food supply (Wang et al.). As a result of these and other problems, food anxieties have arisen and various bottom-up forces, including civil society organizations, alternative food initiatives, farmers, and consumers, have started to promote and engage in more sustainable food production and ethical consumption (Si and Scott; Zhang and Qi; Leggett). In this context, the Beijing Farmersâ Market, to which small-scale ecological farmers from nearby villages travel around twice a week to sell their produce directly to urbanites, was established in 2010 (Ren).
At the Market, different booths offer grains, vegetables, fruits, eggs, unprocessed meats, and semi-processed foods such as popcorn, dried fruits, jams, juice, rice wine, and tofu, all labeled by the Market and the farmers as ecologically produced. This means that no agrichemicals are used in the growing and processing of the food. To earn the ecological label, farmers need to demonstrate care not only for what they grow, but for everything involved in the cultivation process, including the soil, bugs, birds, and even the bacteria and fungi on their farm. In this sense, the notion of the ecological that circulates around the Market pertains to a complex ethics of care that resonates with environmentalist discourses in environmental studies, feminist ecocriticism, and cultural studies. By labeling their products as ecological, the farmers and the Market contribute to a new imagination of the rural designed to manage food-safety anxiety, while also promising a way out of the other crises caused by the profit-oriented capitalist logic, such as environmental degradation and (rural-to-urban migrant) labor exploitation.
In China, the hukou household registration system continues to affirm the historical construction of the rural and the urban as separate spaces and
Interestingly, the ecologically focused imagination of the rural promoted by the Beijing Farmersâ Market appears to contrast with the stereotypical image of rural China as poor, underdeveloped, and uncivilized (Cohen; Kipnis; Clarke-Sather), while also not being entirely consistent with the âromantic reappraisalâ of the rural. In this chapter, I make clear what the ecologically focused rural imagination circulating around the Beijing Farmersâ Market entails and ask how it might reconfigure the understanding of Chinaâs rural-urban nexus.
This chapter is based on fieldwork conducted between September 2020 and August 2021 at the Beijing Farmersâ Market and on several ecological farms that supply the Market. During my fieldwork I volunteered at the Market 23 times, conducting participatory observations, chatting with ecological farmers, listening to their discussions, negotiations, worries, and complaints, interviewing them while helping to sell the ecological produce, and responding to the buyersâ challenging questions about ecological farming. From November 2020, through a series of PGS (Participatory Guarantee Systems)4 farm visits
In what follows, I will first probe how the farmers involved in the Beijing Farmersâ Market imagine and practice ecological farming, and elaborate on how this involves an ethics of care for an entangled, more-than-human ecosystem. I also demonstrate how the ecologically focused rural imagination of the farmers repurposes an âauthenticâ idyll with Chinese characteristics. Finally, I illustrate how the ecological farmers, many of whom come from the urban, oppose themselves to conventional rural farmers by imagining the latter through the historical stereotype of rural people as backward and uncivilized. In this way, I make clear that the rural imagination associated with the Beijing Farmersâ Market is characterized by a tense, frictional dynamic that means it does not fully endorse either the rural-urban binary that considers the urban superior to the rural or the romanticizing rural idyll that appears to be making a comeback in Chinese society. Rather, in the context of the Market and the need to address food-safety and environmental crises, we see a twisting together of different rural imaginations, both positive and negative.
2 The âAuthenticâ Idyll and Its Ethics of Care
I feed the poultry every day. This doesnât mean that I raise them, but that I cooperate with nature â cultivate the relationship with the poultry through feeding. When they see me passing by with a small bucket, they will come to me, even if there is no food in the bucket. This is because they have a lot of affection for me. Living on my farm, I watch the sunrise every day and feel the connection between the lives in nature. This is the authentic life. I used to live in the city and never felt such connections at all. When I am ploughing the land, the land is ploughing my heart.
Refusing the instant convenience brought by agrichemicals, ecological farmers participating in the Market rely on the ongoing interaction and mutual transformation of human and living nature to farm sustainably. Through a production mode of âco-productionâ between humans and living nature (van der Ploeg 24), agricultural resources are converted not only into a range of products, but also into resources to be fed back into the farm ecosystem. The human-nature interaction involved fosters an ethics of care that recognizes the agency of all âothers,â be it other beings or other nature (Jackson and Palmer). For the ecological farmers, healthy food is the logical consequence of healthy relations between human and non-human agents. On Teacher Huangâs farm, plants feed animals and plants and animals feed farmers, while the farmerâs food waste becomes animal food and animal excrement acts as a fertilizer for plants. Such foodweb-like relations, where species not only feed on each other but one speciesâ waste becomes anotherâs food (Ingham), constructs a nutrition circulation that makes future production sustainable and develops a web of obligations and asymmetrical reciprocities among humans and living nature: the thing âyou depend on depends on those who depend on youâ (Puig de la Bellacasa 199).
Importantly, besides relations of affection, the entangled and more-than-human ethics of care also acknowledges rivalries and the sacrifice of lives on the farm. This, I argue, distinguishes the ecological rural imagination from the rural idyll, and repurposes the notion of the âauthenticâ idyll. As shown in Teacher Huangâs narration, the discourse of âauthentic lifeâ is utilized by the ecological farmers to describe their sense of ecological relatedness to nature and nonhumans. This relatedness includes predation, which threatens the production yield. I observed how, on Teacher Huangâs farm, poultry, sheep, and cattle are free to walk around, and the vegetables stored outside the fences are often
This clarifies why Teacher Huang identifies herself as a âlife manager.â Compared with conventional farm produce grown in well-protected contexts, with agrichemicals killing âharmfulâ species and urging the produce to absorb maximum ânutrition,â the life forms on her farm are part of âopen-ended assemblages of entangled ways of lifeâ (Tsing 4). This is what the ecological farmers believe is the âauthenticâ world that should be sustained. Tsing explains the âassemblageâ as an open-ended gathering or ecological community where varied species influence each other: âsome thwart (or eat) each other; others work together to make life possible; still others just happen to find themselves in the same placeâ (22). In an assemblage, living things make the world together through seasonal pulses of growth in multiple directions and through mutual disturbances, instead of steadily moving forward in a singular direction under the control of humans. On Teacher Huangâs farm, all interactions among humans and nonhumans are carefully cultivated on the basis of knowing each speciesâ living habits and making room for their disturbances. Such knowing, as indicated by Puig de la Bellacasa, is an essentially relational process that requires care. With Teacher Huang prioritizing coming to know other species, the multidirectional ecological relations of care on her farm are built on an understanding of onto-epistemological heterogeneity, and on endowing each species with agency of its own.
In most cases, the âauthenticâ rural idyll that embraces the disturbances of living nature espoused by those associated with the Beijing Farmersâ Market finds its source in Chinese classic philosophy,5 specifically in the concept of tianren heyi (the unity between the natural and the human), one of the main tenets of almost all Chinese philosophical schools. Having asked himself âwhy do human beings try by every means to kill insects just because they take a bite from the vegetables?â and concluded that âhuman beings eat vegetables for a living; the insects, too, eat vegetables to live,â Brother Zhou, another
Represented as a cosmic triad of heaven, earth and humankind, the unity between humans and nature here is grounded in tianren zhifen (the distinction between the natural and the human (Li 115)). Li comments that Xunzi emphasized the struggle between human existence and nature; he sought to âunderstand how nature as it pertained to people could be controlled and remade by those peopleâ (119). At the same time, this transformative process requires zhitian (knowing nature) and attuning to natural laws (Li 119). In this sense, humans are complementarily integrated in heaven and earth, while also remaining distinct from these natural realms; humans should negotiate with living nature rather than solely control it or imitate it unreflectively. Believing in the triad model, Brother Zhou respects the lifeforms on his farm and consistently adjusts his farming methods according to the changing climate, insect activities, land conditions, consumer feedback, and government policies in order to achieve the reconciliation between the elements of the triad. In correspondence with the âauthenticâ way of being discussed above, the triad model avoids both human-centrism and naturalism, illustrating instead a symbiotic community of life in which all beings are interdependent, in both supportive and disruptive ways.
Since most traditional Chinese customs and social relation patterns were developed based on agriculture (Fei), rural villages where there is land available for farming offer a way for ecological farmers to revive Chinese traditional culture, which is believed to harbor a wisdom lost in contemporary society. Ancient Chinese books such as Huangdi Neijing (Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor, 2022), Qimin Yaoshu (Essentials of Peopleâs Livelihood, 2022) and Nongzheng Quanshu (Complete Treatise on Agriculture, 2020) are frequently found on the bookshelves of the ecological farmersâ village homes as providing useful guidance for how to farm without agrichemicals. Some of the ecological farmers produce seasonal food according to the Chinese traditional 24 jieqi (24 solar terms) and believe that the wisdom of the ancestors inhabits the seasonal diet of Chinese traditional culture.6 For example, with regard to making
The farmers associated with the Beijing Farmersâ Market thus imagine the rural environment they work in as a space where they can stay close to nature, cultivate relations of care with nonhuman agencies, and live similarly to their ancestors, so that they can be enlightened by traditional wisdom. Echoing classic Chinese philosophy, the âauthenticâ idyll here is not only about pleasant harmony, but also about recognizing how rivaling life forms can threaten each other. By respecting and preserving the entanglement of all lifeforms as involving support and disturbance, an âauthentic lifeâ can be achieved in the rural. Here, the âauthenticâ does not refer to a romanticized notion of the village, but to a praxis of âauthentic lifeâ based in âauthentic traditional Chinese culture.â This praxis does not propose a reconstruction of the past but takes into account the situated aspects of the contemporary rural (Halfacree), such as the land provided for farming, the opportunities for gaining production autonomy, and the presence of low-rent living spaces. At the same time, as I will show in the following section, this âauthenticâ idyll, besides opposing itself to urban lifestyles, also opposes itself to certain present-day rural realities.
3 Ecological versus Conventional Farmers: the Othered Rural
When the Beijing Farmersâ Market staff organize PGS visits to ecological farms, they are particularly concerned with checking whether the farmers have built
Of the twenty farmers who participate in the Beijing Farmersâ Market frequently, only one or two have always lived in the rural; the others have urban backgrounds. Some of the farmers were born in rural villages and returned to rural life after being educated and working in the city; others, with urban origins, went to agricultural universities or held professional jobs before becoming farmers, including as an auditor in the US and as a senior foreign trader involved in facilitating Chinaâs joining of the WTO. Their reasons for working on self-owned or rented farms include a realization that conventionally produced food harms human health, a yearning for how food tasted in the old days, and a sense of having been exhausted by the fast-paced urban economy. Like their backgrounds and motivations, the extent of the ecological farmersâ farming experience varies. Most practical farming expertise is acquired as they set up their ecological farms. What is essential to note, however, is that land and capital are needed to start an ecological farm: some farmers own rural land and houses, and most came to the rural with the money they accumulated as urban professionals. Since it requires a three-year conversion period to transform a farm from a conventional one with agrichemical residues into an ecological one, ecological farmers need to have enough money to afford land rents (if they do not own land), production costs, and living expenses to survive this period when they cannot yet sell at the higher prices fetched by ecological produce.
When the Beijing Farmersâ Market celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2020, it held a special market in Beijing Kerry Centre, a shopping mall situated in Beijingâs Central Business District. Several of the straw hats that Chinese farmers usually wear when laboring in the field were hung up as decorations. On one of the hats, the phrase âhigh-level intellectual new farmers build the Beijing
Significantly, the notion of conventional farmers as backward and uncivilized is constantly evoked in the context of the Beijing Farmersâ Market to emphasize the high value of the ecological food sold there, and to place this food into the development narrative of Chinese society. In the articles published by the Marketâs official WeChat account, ecological farmers are portrayed as knowledgeable, friendly, and optimistic individuals who bring a sense of social and environmental responsibility to food production, while conventional farmers are portrayed as unenlightened individuals who question ecological farmers and passively submit to the urban production logic. Thus, in a WeChat article introducing the story of Hou, his conventional neighbors are described as ignorant villagers who cannot understand why he chose to put in more effort for a lower yield and who do not realize that the increase in local cancer rates is related to their use of agrichemicals. At the same time, this article obfuscates the structural reasons behind the adoption of different farming practices; Houâs conventional neighbors might not have the material, educational, or financial capital that makes ecological farming feasible.
The valuated hierarchy the Market establishes between ecological and conventional farmers is also apparent in the employment relationships on the ecological farms. Two to three conventional farmers from the village are usually hired to do technical or manual farm work, like sowing seeds and turning over the soil, under the instruction of the ecological farmers. Though the conventional farmers are highly skilled, they are treated not as experts but as having to be educated and supervised. Cody notices a similar division of labor on organic farms in Shanghai and points out that ârather than follow earlier intellectualsâ goal of transforming rural residents, intellectuals today engage with urban attendees and encourage them to move to the countryside and take up sustainable farming; intellectuals harbour the belief that cultural and economic capital imported from the city is needed to remake the countrysideâ (2019: 103).
To understand the deeper aim of the ecologically focused rural imagination generated in the context of the Market, it is important to examine the different attitudes to the urban-dominated market of ecological and conventional farmers. Shengpu, a beekeeper who produces premium-quality honey and only scoops out the hives once a year, explained how conventional honey is produced under the dominance of âfood factoriesâ:
Nowadays, many foods can be made artificially, which makes people feel farther and farther away from nature. Take honey as an example. 50% of honey sold in supermarkets is not honey, but a compound of high fructose syrup with food dyes and additives, pretending to be honey. As distributors buy honey at a very low price, beekeepers have to increase the frequency of scooping out honey to make a living. This kind of honey contains a lot of water, unlike mature honey. However, food factories donât care about this, because they will use machines to heat and dehydrate the immature honey, which causes nutritional damage and harmful substances. Then they will further use the industrialized way of the food industry to remove harmful substances and add the artificial nutrition good honey should contain to produce âgood honey.â
Shengpu opposes his ecological product to the conventional honey that pretends to be good but is actually a âlookalikeâ (van der Ploeg 107). In the world created and patterned by the industrialized food industry, as Van der Ploeg indicates, âlookalikesâ are increasingly produced by food empires; they are actually non-foodstuffs that are produced artificially and appear as food in order to be distributed under the latter label. In essence, the âlookalikesâ are a device to make more profit by extending the selling time and transportation distance while cutting the production costs. However, because of asymmetric information in the food supply chain, consumers know little about how the food they consume is produced.
While the ecological farmers in many ways continue to privilege urban subjects and forms of knowledge, their critique of the industrialized food system also resists urban-dominated extractive capitalism. Tsing clarifies that the making of capitalist assets is achieved through a process of alienation, a form of disentanglement that removes things from their life-worlds to become commensurable counters for further investments, which results in infinite needs as there is no limit on how many assets investors want. By obviating living-space entanglements, alienation reduces time and space constraints, thus enabling capitalist production to cater to these infinite desires. âLookalikesâ are born out of this extractive system. The ecological farmers associated with the Beijing Farmersâ Market define their produce as signifying âauthentic livesâ that are deeply entangled in more-than-human living webs, meaning non-alienated ones, not just to label it as safe food but also to counter the extractive system, its infinite desire for expansion, and its moral decay with an ethics of care emphatically linked to living in a rural environment.
4 Conclusion
In the ecologically focused rural imagination constructed around the Beijing Farmersâ Market, both positive and negative sentiments about rurality play a role. On the one hand, this imagination partially falls back on idyllic ideas of farming that construct the rural as the space where people like the ecological farmers can cultivate an ethics of care towards other beings, re-enact the ways of life of Chinaâs remote past, and escape the alienation fostered and the risks produced by the urban-centered food system supported by conventional farming. On the other hand, the Marketâs ecological farmers also engage in the reiteration of a rural-urban binary in which they position themselves as part of a more urbanized, educated elite and the conventional farmers as ignorant and uncivilized. Thus, this imagination offers up the rural as a retreat from
Yan distinguishes three levels of food-safety problems in China: food hygiene, unsafe food, and poisonous food. Food hygiene refers to food processing under poor sanitary conditions that does not meet quality-control standards; unsafe food results mainly from the heavy use of agrichemicals, preservatives, flavor enhancers, colorants, and pollution and environmental degradation; poisonous food is a result of deliberate contamination, with food producers, processors, and traders adding an array of banned toxic chemicals to human food or animal feed in order to enhance profits.
The hukou system, a national population management system making a strict distinction between peasants (most village dwellers) and non-peasants (almost all town and city dwellers), was established in 1958 and limits permanent migration from rural to urban areas to this day.
Chinaâs class system was developed between 1949 and 1978 to distinguish revolutionaries from counterrevolutionaries, progressive citizens from backward ones, and friends from enemies (Billeter). Rural class labels like landlord, rich peasant, middle peasant, and so forth, were based on (lack of) land ownership, and urban class labels primarily on oneâs occupation. Between 1958 and 1978, the interaction of this class system with the household registration system created a context in which poor peasants, though deprived of material prosperity, were perceived as morally superior to urbanites.
PGS aim for a democratization of knowledge and for the co-creation by producers, experts, and consumers of the standards for the oversight compliance system for ecological agriculture (IFOAM). During the PGS visits to farms organized by the Beijing Farmersâ Market, participants are asked to examine the farmerâs practices by looking at what kind of fertilizer, seeds, etc. they use, according to a checklist compiled by the Market.
It should be noted that, while the Beijing Farmersâ Market and its ecological farmers privilege Chinese traditions, other practices also serve as models, with some farmers referencing Permaculture from Australia, Biodynamic Agriculture from Europe, or Natural Farming from Japan.
The Ancient Chinese divided the sunâs annual circular motion into 24 equal segments or âsolar termsâ that guided agricultural affairs, reflecting changes of climate, natural phenomena, agricultural production, and everyday life, including food, housing, and clothing.
This theory holds that everything in the universe can be divided into five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, and is used to describe the relationship of interdependence between all things.
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