Feeding Shanghai: Lanlingnese peasants and the making of "supply chain qua world" in post-socialist China

Liao, Yue

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121207 Copy

Description

Title

Feeding Shanghai: Lanlingnese peasants and the making of "supply chain qua world" in post-socialist China

Author(s)

Liao, Yue

Issue Date

2023-06-28

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Martin, Jeffrey T

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Martin, Jeffrey T

Committee Member(s)

• Orta, Andrew
• Greenberg, Jessica R
• Gille, Zsuzsa

Department of Study

Anthropology

Discipline

Anthropology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Chinese Greenhouse
• Vegetable Supply Chain
• World-making
• China

Abstract

This dissertation explores the lifeworld of contemporary Chinese peasants engaged in a novel mode of agricultural production, one which is not rooted in the soil but rather routed through advanced technologies like Chinese-styled greenhouses, refrigerated trucks, and modern superhighways. Specifically, it examines the world-making aspect of the agricultural processes which bind Shanghai to a vegetable-growing hinterland 400 miles away, in Lanling County. I focus on the economic practices through which Lanlingnese farmers, as vegetable-producing/trading subjects, shape and are shaped by the supply chains that link their agricultural activity to the larger world beyond the rural countryside. Organizing my narrative through the trope of a “supply chain qua world,” the study aims to capture the whole picture of this emergent economic circuit encompassing not only material infrastructures (the commodity chain) but also subjective affects (sentiments, dispositions, and desires). On the basis of this description, I argue that the translocal food supply chain constitutes a meaningful world. Lanlingnese peasant farmers, who both adapt to and help shape this world, rely on it to pursue a more flexible, risky and challenging, agricultural life. Better understanding their lives opens up a new way of thinking about the lifeworld of contemporary agricultural subjects in the new era of global flows. Through 12 months of multi-sited fieldwork in Lanling and Shanghai, I have investigated how a group of Lanlingnese farmers rely on differentiated kinds of mobilities to both passively experience and actively imagine and construct the hidden infrastructure of provisioning through which the “security” and “freshness” of Shanghai’s vegetable market is generated. These peasant farmers, I argue, are engaged in a novel form of capital-intensive agriculture that is increasingly entangled in far removed urban foodways. Their participation in this supply chain allows them to create worlds for themselves in ways both empowering and challenging. My description of this Shanghai-Lanling “supply chain qua world” exemplifies the larger rural-urban dynamics by which contemporary China is pursuing an integrated, self-contained domestic food supply system towards the goal of reducing or replacing its dependence on global commodity flows. The stakes of my study are thus not merely to demonstrate how regional economies and post-socialist market reforms are shaped by agrarian capitalism, state governance, and affective connections, but to address the enduring quandary of how China can feed itself under current conditions of neoliberalism.

Graduation Semester

2023-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Yue Liao

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