Apples and oranges: political crops with and against the state in rural China

Abstract

In this article we bring together conceptual threads from political ecology, commodity geographies and agrarian studies to enable an inquiry into the political nature of crops. This inquiry is underpinned by the idea that crops are not just a means or a target of political projects, but can have effects through their webs of relations, and that their different capacities might mean that they may differently engage in political projects. This article examines how specialized cash crops in rural China are enrolled in state projects. We explore the cases of orange orchards and apple orchards in different locations in Hebei by detailing flows of capital and expertise, and smallholder-crop relations. Our analysis demonstrates that a political ecology of cash crops can provide insight into the politics of successive state projects that have been rolled out in China's agricultural communities. We argue that through evolving relations with smallholders, the attributes of the crops themselves, and particular market dynamics, robust smallholder-crop complexes have emerged that are currently proving resistant to the latest state project to achieve at-scale, industrialized agriculture. If we take political crops and their relations seriously in the story of contemporary agrarian change in China, we find that apple and oranges, previously with the state, can also come to act against it.

Hydropolitical potentialities in a post-'Day Zero' Cape Town: "Sensemaking" and the Cape Flats Aquifer

“…The PHA Campaign, farming in an area that is dominated by commercial farmers who depend on monocropping and inorganic fertilizers, it has attempted to put forward alternative ways of interacting with environmental resources. Akin to case studies in India (Santha et al, 2024) and across the world (Hetherington, 2020;Pasgaard et al, 2022;Rogers et al, 2022), political ecology challenges forms of commercial agriculture.…”

Putting ‘rupture’ to work at the Three Gorges Dam

“…This is a landscape that has been inscribed and reinscribed over centuries and by successive political states: which again begs the question, beyond saying that multiplicity encompasses historical agents, where does rupture begin? Similarly, in terms of the more-than-human implications of the Three Gorges Dam, there are clearly extensive impacts on fish migration, water quality, and river flow (see for instance Wang et al, 2016), habitat and micro-climates in the tributaries, cropping systems (see Rogers et al, 2022) and potentially the geological processes of the region. Properly understanding these implications requires an interdisciplinarity that is not very evident in existing scholarship.…”

“…Dialogues in Human Geography 13(2) historical agents, where does rupture begin? Similarly, in of the more-than-human implications of the Three Gorges Dam, there are clearly extensive impacts on fish migration, water quality, and river flow (see for instance Wang et al, 2016), habitat and micro-climates in the tributaries, cropping systems (see Rogers et al, 2022) and potentially the geological processes of the region.…”

Farmers’ cooperatives in Southwest China: Beyond the dichotomies of failure/success and (in) authenticity?

“…Our interviews with a dozen coffee FC leaders and with several long-term experts in Yunnan's coffee industry suggest that no FCs in this region undertake collective activities, and profit is rarely returned to the FC members. Moreover, FCs in Yunnan rarely function as knowledge brokers to facilitate information dissemination (Rogers et al, 2023). In most cases, leaders of the FCs are local elites, some of whom openly admit that the establishment of the FC was simply for the purpose of ‘registration’.…”