Exemplary Agriculture: Organic Farming and Urban/Rural Space in China

Abstract

Exemplary agriculture is a grassroots alternative food movement in Shanghai, China and the surrounding countryside. At the movement’s centre are a group of 13 independent and small-scale organic farmers. This thesis outlines the movement’s formation and functioning, and discusses participants’ motivations and objectives. It also identifies relationships between movement activists and intellectuals, rural residents, volunteers on the farms and customers in the city.

Exemplary agriculture is different to other alternative food movements because it is heavily influenced by the continuing legacies of state socialism. Two legacies in particular affect how exemplary agriculturalists think and act. The first is exemplarity, a form of morality and social governance that achieves order through leadership by example and the emulation of role models. Exemplarity and the promotion of role models has been a pillar of Chinese Communist Party policy since the 1940s. The second is the differentiation of the urban and the rural. The household registration system, established by the CCP in the 1950s, paved the way for the formation of powerful discourses of urban/rural difference. These discourses polarise the city and the countryside into discrete spaces and identities with clearly demarcated boundaries, privileging the urban.

Exemplary agriculturalists worry about the health of Chinese society and want to provide alternatives. By growing organic produce in the countryside and selling to customers in the city, they want to relieve Chinese urbanites from anxiety caused by food safety concerns. At a deeper level, they want to influence urban attitudes toward rural China and improve relations between the two groups. Exemplary agriculturalists adopt principles derived from rural culture and call on others to emulate them. They encourage urban residents to apply these principles to their own lives, thereby facilitating alternative and better ways of city living. In short, they borrow from the rural to help the urban.