Dr. Zhang publishes chapter on The Political Ecology of Industrial Crops

Dr. Zhang just published a chapter in the book The Political Ecology of Industrial Crops (Routledge, 2021).

Zhang, L. (2021). “The political ecology of maize in China: National food security and reclassification from staple to industrial crop.” In The Political Ecology of Industrial Crops, A. Ahmed and A. Gasparatos (eds.), London: Routledge, pp. 221 – 243.

The future of maize in China is currently at a crossroads. It is not clear whether it will continue to be protected by strict food self-sufficiency regulations as a strategic staple food crop (alongside rice and wheat), or whether it will be reclassified as an industrial crop and abandoned to market dynamics similar to soybeans. This chapter examines different forces that push and pull in each direction, revealing where the balance currently lies in this tug-of-war, and what political, economic, and ecological transformations could be expected across different regions of China. This chapter draws upon an in-depth analysis of Chinese scientific literature and primary data from two provinces in China to describe the policy transformations regarding the classification of maize and analyze who stands to benefit and lose through this process. It identifies how policy transformations have followed the increasing trend toward the industrial use of maize for livestock feed, biofuel, and very diverse starch-based industrial products. Yet the government continues to classify maize as a strategic staple food crop, even though less than 5% is consumed directly as food each year. This chapter argues that the promotion of silage maize has emerged as the main compromise at this crossroads, and its advancement is likely to concentrate agribusiness production further in the hands of wealthy investors and displace small-scale agroecological production among peasants.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429351105-14/political-ecology-maize-china-li-zhang

Dr. Zhang interviewed by The Diplomat about her book on the Origins of COVID-19

Dr. Li Zhang was interviewed by The Diplomat on her new book on The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2021).

Li Zhang on China, COVID-19 and Global Capitalism

When searching for the origins of the pandemic, we shouldn’t overlook the role played by capitalism in paving a path for the disease.

In “The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism,” Li Zhang, a visiting assistant professor of global and international studies at the University of California, Irvine, pushes past nationalistic tussling over the origins of COVID-19. Moving beyond “narrow cultural, political, or biomedical frameworks” Zhang instead focus on the overarching, global forces that underpin modern life — capitalism, consumerism, privatization, and industrialization — and contributed to the emergence of COVID-19.

“The hallmarks of modernity and economic development in China, celebrated as the instruments used by the state to successfully control the epidemic, are at the root of this and other emerging diseases with pandemic potential,” she writes in the book’s prelude, a theme which repeats itself through the short but incisive text. And these hallmarks of modernity are not exclusive to China. By focusing on the global systems that underpin modern life — and enable diseases with pandemic potential to spread — Zhang does not get bogged down in the geopolitical blame game that has so distracted the world.

In the following interview with The Diplomat’s Managing Editor Catherine Putz, Zhang discusses the pandemic, state responses to it, and the role of capitalism in seeding the ground for its rapid spread.

https://thediplomat.com/2021/10/li-zhang-on-china-covid-19-and-global-capitalism/

Dr. Zhang published in Development on China and the UN Food System Summit

Dr. Li Zhang just published an article in the journal Development as part of a special issue on the UN Food System Summit.

Zhang, L. (2021). “China and the UN Food System Summit: Silenced Disputes and Ambivalence on Food Safety, Sovereignty, Justice, and Resilience.” Development 64(3 – 4): 303 – 307.

Abstract

China is a major agricultural power. It dramatically reduced hunger and increased its role in many forums for international governance. However, the Chinese government and society neither played a prominent role in the UNFSS nor in its critique. This article exposes how tensions and ambivalence about agroecology and food sovereignty in China create silences in these discussions, and addressing them within China can also resolve the global tensions that marked the UNFSS as a whole.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41301-021-00323-y

Dr. Zhang’s book on The Origins of COVID-19 is forthcoming with Stanford University Press

A new strain of coronavirus was detected in December 2019, when patients were admitted to hospitals in Wuhan with severe pneumonia, most of them linked to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. China’s effective containment of the epidemic, in glaring contrast with Europe and the U.S., was heralded as testament to the Chinese Communist Party’s unparalleled command over biomedical sciences, population, and economy. However, much academic and public debate about the origins of COVID-19 in China focused on supposedly “backwards” cultural practices of consuming wild animals, and the perceived problem of authoritarianism suppressing information about the outbreak.

 

In The Origins of COVID-19, Li Zhang shifts the debate away from these narrow cultural, political, or biomedical frameworks, emphasizing that the origins of diseases with pandemic potential must be considered within the more complex entanglements of state-making, science and technology, and global capitalism. She argues that both the narrative of China’s victory and the racist depictions of its culpability do not address, but may even aggravate, these larger forces that degrade the environment and increase human-wildlife interactions through which novel pathogens spill over into humans and may rapidly expand into global pandemics.

 

This book is a history of the present, a study of the roots of the current pandemic within the context of both China and global capitalism. It is also a warning that the recovery of a capitalist economy will reinforce conditions for the continuing emergence of infectious diseases with pandemic potential.

The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism 

was published with Stanford University Press on August 3, 2021!

Dr. Zhang’s team awarded $1 million to study impact of COVID-19 on food supply chains

By mid-March, with much of the country shut down to stem the spread of COVID-19, Li Zhang and her collaborator, Gustavo Oliveira, were – like many around the world – witnessing the impact of pandemic panic buying and Coronavirus closures. Empty grocery store shelves where staples like flour, rice and bread were once stacked instead brandished signs limiting bulk purchases and notifying consumers when limited shipments would arrive. At the same time, Zhang, a visiting assistant professor of global and international studies at UCI and active WeChat user, started seeing a new form of commerce emerging on the online platform among her predominantly Chinese contacts across Orange and Los Angeles Counties.

“With all of the supply chain disruptions happening, restaurants closed or with reduced operations, and virtually no or very limited institutional clients, wholesalers began connecting with consumers to offload products, filling a need for both” says Zhang who teaches Global Food and the Environment and Global Pandemics courses at UCI.

It was a bit messy at the outset, she says, as buyers scrambled to either cost share or take delivery of products not intended for individual consumption (like the 50-pound bag of flour her household is still working its way through). But the result, says Oliveira, an assistant professor of global and international studies at UCI, has been a fascinating new network of exchange fueled by crisis-driven ingenuity.

li zhang“The buying and exchange habits that transpired at the outset of the pandemic are not unlike what you might see in times of other crises, like a hurricane, but what’s different here is the length of time the pandemic has required these systems to operate and the importance informal, less established networks have played,” says Oliveira. “We’re interested in how some of these new systems might be sustained, how old systems might be better adapted for resilience during future catastrophes, and what these changes mean for vulnerable communities involved in the processes.”

As scholars who study critical food, agricultural and environmental justice issues, Zhang and Oliveira shared their observations and interest in the new phenomenon with their research networks, and a team was quickly formed to dive into the ways the pandemic has disrupted and adapted regional food supply chains in the U.S. The collaborative effort – which includes economists, landscape architects, communication specialists, and other interdisciplinary social scientists and political ecologists at the University of Florida, University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Minnesota, and Kansas State University – was recently awarded a $1 million rapid response grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

gustavo oliveiraFor their part, Zhang and Oliveira received $92,057 to adapt surveys originally developed to study climate change-induced disruptions of agricultural production, and organize qualitative case studies and focus groups for food supply chain actors to share innovations. The project will reveal how traditional – as well as the emergence of alternative – networks that have enabled the food supply chain to survive and thrive amid the COVID-19 crisis. They plan to pay particular attention to issues of gender, race, social equity and resilience along the entire food supply chain – from farm workers to processing plants to distribution drivers and centers – so they may highlight the disproportionate weight vulnerable and marginalized communities carry within the network while experiencing crisis-driven hardship themselves. Their partnerships with the LA Food Policy Council and the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources will help get the survey directly into the right hands in California, says Oliveira, while similar community partnerships will help facilitate regional distribution across the nation.

“Given the risk of future pandemics and climate change-induced disruptions to local and even global food supply chains, our research will continue to generate crucial knowledge and practical engagements for many years to come,” says Oliveira.

Funding for this work began in September and runs through September 2022.

-Heather Ashbach, UCI Social Sciences
-pictured: Zhang, Oliveira.

Dr. Zhang published in Agriculture and Human Values

From Left Behind to Leader: Gender, Agency, and Food Sovereignty in China

Dr. Li Zhang

 

Abstract

Capitalist reforms usually drive outmigration of peasants to cities, while elders, children, and women responsible for their care are “left behind” in the countryside. The plight of these “left behind” populations is a major focus of recent agrarian studies in China. However, rural women are not merely passive victims of these transformations. Building on ethnographic research in Guangxi and Henan provinces from 2013 to 2017, and drawing on critical gender studies and feminist political ecology, I show how the food safety crisis in China creates conditions for peasant women to increase control and income from organic food production, often establishing alternative food networks with the support of female scholars and NGO organizers. Thus, I shift focus of scholarship on rural women from “left behind” to leaders in struggles for justice and food sovereignty.

 

Agriculture and Human Values is the journal of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society. The Journal, like the Society, is dedicated to an open and free discussion of the values that shape and the structures that underlie current and alternative visions of food and agricultural systems. To this end the Journal publishes interdisciplinary research that critically examines the values, relationships, conflicts and contradictions within contemporary agricultural and food systems and that addresses the impact of agricultural and food related institutions, policies, and practices on human populations, the environment, democratic governance, and social equity.

 

The article can be found here.

Author’s original manuscript accepted for publication can be found here.

Dr. Zhang published in Al Jazeera

Coronavirus leaked from a lab? Blame capitalism, not China

Dr. Li Zhang

Al Jazeera, May 20, 2020

 

 

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the Chinese city of Wuhan, there has been as much research as conjecture about its origins. This issue became extremely politicised in the “new cold war” between the United States and China.

US President Donald Drumpf, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Republican Senator Tom Cotton have all suggested that the novel coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan. In response, Chinese government officials have claimed the virus may have originated in a lab in the US.

While this blame game continues to make headlines in international media, behind the smoke and mirrors lurks the real cause of the pandemic – a common problem shared by the US, China, and the rest of the world – capitalism.

Despite uncertainty about the origins of COVID-19, there are a few things we do know. The new coronavirus’s genomic sequence was identified in early January, and soon an international scientific consensus emerged that it evolved originally in bats, then likely jumped over to humans through an intermediary species.

Scientific research is pointing towards pangolins, tree shrews, or ferrets as the likely bridge between bats and humans. There is no scientific evidence that the virus was deliberately manufactured in any laboratory. In fact, the US intelligence community has repeatedly stated they believe the origin of the new virus is natural.

But how did this natural spillover cause an outbreak in Wuhan? The “blame China” rhetoric now points to a possible accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Scientists there research coronaviruses from bats, and unless new epidemiological data emerges, it may be impossible to disprove a theory involving a lab accident. But even if we assume a lab leak, is blaming China for it the right way to think about the problem?

Laboratory accidents involving dangerous diseases have occurred many times all around the world, including the US. In 2014, the Food and Drug Administration found six vials of smallpox accidentally abandoned in an insecure storage room. That same year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention accidentally sent viable anthrax spores to three insecure labs, possibly exposing researchers to the deadly bacteria. Then in 2015, the Pentagon accidentally shipped live anthrax to nine states and even to South Korea. Thankfully, those accidents did not cause any deaths, but there have been others that have turned out deadly.

According to a study by Karen Byers of the American Biological Safety Association, there were at least 1,141 instances of “laboratory acquired infections” reported worldwide between 1979 and 2005, some of which have resulted in deaths.

Several accidents with smallpox in the United Kingdom killed three people in the 1970s. An influenza virus leak in China caused an outbreak in the 1970s which also spread outside the country and caused a number of deaths. An epidemic of encephalitis in Venezuela and Colombia that killed at least 311 people in 1995 was likely caused by a laboratory incident.

In 2003 and 2004, lab workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and mainland China, were accidentally infected with SARS, spreading the disease to seven people and causing one death after the epidemic had already been contained.

Laboratory accidents are an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of research on highly infectious and deadly diseases. No country is immune to them.

The key then is to understand why such diseases with pandemic potential emerge in the first place, and how to prevent them. Here, scientific consensus clearly points towards structural issues that affect the whole world.

First, rapid urbanisation and increased mobility make it more likely for a local outbreak to become a pandemic. Wuhan is a major transportation hub and China is now at the centre of many global supply chains. Both of these factors contributed to the rapid spread of the coronavirus.

The risk of new diseases jumping between animals and humans has increased with the loss of natural habitat for wildlife, and new infrastructures reaching deep into forests and mountains. The same holds for the trade in wild animals, which has flourished over the past few decades, boosted by growing consumerism.

Wild animals like pangolins, which are used for food and traditional medicine, were being smuggled into China at an alarming rate before the pandemic. At the same time, in an effort to alleviate rural poverty, the Chinese government promoted market-oriented breeding and e-commerce of some wild animals. These practices increased close and potentially infection-transmitting interactions between wild animals and humans in wet markets, like Wuhan’s, where the novel coronavirus is believed to have originated.

Industrial-scale poultry and livestock have also increased the risk of new zoonotic diseases which could cause pandemics. As the evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace has argued, capitalist agribusiness “offers the exact means by which pathogens can evolve the most virulent and infectious phenotypes”.

Destruction of forests and other habitats, consumerism, trade in wildlife and industrial-scale animal breeding are not unique to China. They are global phenomena.

If this pandemic originated in China, the next one may break out in Brazil, Nigeria, the US or anywhere else really.

Trading blame for this tragedy may be politically expedient for world leaders and the idea of a lab leak may come in handy, but none of this is really helping the world cope better with it. The real problems that cause new diseases to emerge and trigger pandemics are global, and much more intractable and concerning than lab accidents alone.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The article can be found here.

Dr. Zhang published in Latitude: Goethe Institut

“Fusion Food”: Exchange or Appropriation?

Dr. Li Zhang, with Regine Hader, Elisa Jochum, Anna Felicity Friedman, and Ozoz Sokoh

Latitude: Rethinking Power Relations for a Decolonized and Non-Racial World

Goethe Institute, October 29, 2019

 

(…)

Li Zhang: Food is essential for human survival, so most people in our history have eaten what they could get access to. Sure, each culture developed its own varieties of crops and animals, and its own cuisine and way of cooking. But “globalisation” is not just a recent phenomenon, and we have been exchanging food and seeds around the world for centuries. Can you imagine “Italian food” without tomatoes from the Americas? It is the same thing in China. Sichuan food could only become spicy with the addition of hot chili peppers from the Americas. We also make lots of traditional dishes with corn, potatoes and other ingredients that were not originally domesticated in China. Importing these varieties centuries ago helped solve a lot of hunger issues in China, as in Europe and elsewhere, too. Most of these exchanges happened because of colonialism, but people’s concern, when it came to food, was basically to survive. This doesn’t mean that Anna’s concern is not valid.

(…)

Li Zhang: What matters is not mainly our cultural identity or (dis-)respectful attitude, but the political and economic relationships behind that. We have to think more deeply about who can afford to buy fancy foods from all over the world, and who can only afford to eat the cheapest thing that gets dumped on them. Who can maintain their local foods and culture, and whose foods and cultures have been pushed off the land and squeezed out of the market?

(…)

Li Zhang: The ironic thing is that wealthy, cosmopolitan people in global cities like Shanghai, LA and Berlin can enjoy healthy, organic, “peasant” (as in traditional) food from any place, while the poor peasants who produce that food are now forced to sell it at a premium. Meanwhile, they themselves only get access to cheap, processed foods, most of it dumped from the global North.

(…)

Li Zhang: My sense is that there are important differences [between contemporary food exchange under capitalism and previous historical exchange of foods]. First, when different foods and varieties were exchanged in the past, the process occurred relatively slowly, and the new foods became gradually incorporated into local production practices and cuisines. They became part of food culture, produced locally according to their use value for those who grew it. But, nowadays, international food trade is taking place much faster, and these foods don’t become part of local production practices. They are grown all over the world, often by people who don’t eat them but just grow them for the global market.

(…)

Li Zhang: I think, what many social movements call “food sovereignty”, helps us reflect on your question of diplomacy, bringing it down from the level of governments to real people. Food sovereignty means that people should have the right and power to control what they eat, what they grow, what they buy and sell. It doesn’t mean people should not exchange food, or that people should only consume a particular type of food. But it does mean that people need to have land, be able to keep their own seeds, and protect their own food cultures from colonisation and commodification.

(…)

Li Zhang: Here is my “recipe” for food sovereignty:

Recipe for Food Sovereignty 
People should have the right and power to grow their own food, to control what they eat and how they eat. This makes one’s own food more delicious and nutritious, sustains cultures and environments, and maintains livelihoods and wellbeing of food producers and consumers alike. No matter what food you choose, this basic recipe for food sovereignty will help you make it into a dish worth fighting for!

Ingredients:
abundant land and water
heirloom seeds and local varieties of livestock
indigenous knowledge and cooking practice

First, make sure to access plenty of land and water. If you’ve been dispossessed of this, or lost your knowledge about how to work it, you must struggle to regain it!

Recycle nutrients from your livestock into the soil, preserving and building organic matter. Protect your water and the woods that surround it. This time of preparation might be long, so if your soil and water are depleted and polluted, start improving them right away.

Save your heirloom seeds and exchange them frequently with your neighbours. Do the same with your local varieties of livestock. Well-protected genetic material like this is priceless because it adapts perfectly to your microclimates and resists pests that commonly affect mainstream, industrial, homogenous monocultures. If you have run out of heirloom seeds and local varieties of livestock, coordinate with other local producers to cultivate your community seed bank!

Then, tap into that knowledge held dear by your grandmother, and her grandmother, as you apply modern tools to work the land. Preserve and prepare your foods in the way that reflects and cherishes your own culture.

Serves as many as are willing to struggle in solidarity.

 

 

The article can be found here in German, and here in English.

Dr. Zhang published in the Journal of Asian Studies

Book review of Red China’s Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development under the Commune, by Joshua Eisenman.

Dr. Li Zhang

Journal of Asian Studies, volume 78, issue 3 (August 2019), pp. 646-649.

(…) While making an important contribution to the study of the commune from the 1950s through the early 1980s, the book abstains from drawing implications for contemporary agricultural and rural development (again, see Schmalzer for a good counterpoint). Now that the inefficiencies of individual household production, low rates of investment in the countryside, and dramatic rural exodus are threatening national food security and social stability, the CCP has grown concerned and initiated various reforms to address these problems, which Eisenman demonstrates were previously addressed successfully through collectivization. Yet the government’s reduction of taxation on peasants and increased funds and social programs for “poverty alleviation” and “rural vitalization” are being promoted alongside a dramatic surge of capitalist social relations in the countryside, including wage labor and the effective privatization of farmland through the transfer of land use rights from poor peasants to wealthier farmers, urban investors, and agribusiness corporations. Eisenman could, and perhaps should, contribute more explicitly to a timely critique of ongoing capitalist transformations in China’s countryside.

 

The review can be found here.

Dr. Zhang published in China Dialogue

A feminist critique of the term “left behind” women

Dr. Li Zhang

China Dialogue, August 7, 2019

 

When people migrate to cities in China, many elders, children and the women who care for them are commonly seen as “left behind” (留守) in the countryside, suffering from neglect and exclusion from the benefits of development and modernisation. But is this term accurate and useful to understand and support these people? I argue women are not merely passive victims in this process, and we need to reframe how we address their situation.

‘Left behind’ populations

Since China’s “reform and opening-up”, industrialisation and urbanisation have expanded dramatically. This is usually celebrated as economic growth, modernisation and development. The previous Maoist reverence for the revolutionary fervour of the peasantry has been replaced by the attitude that peasants are backwards, and need to be moved into the cities. This sentiment is now so mainstream that most people in China take it for granted and could not imagine otherwise. However, fast-paced industrialisation and urbanisation has also brought about serious social and environmental problems. Among them is the abandonment of the countryside and rural people, which the influential intellectual Wen Tiejun has characterised famously as the “three rural problems”: declining agricultural production, low income for peasants and underdeveloped rural infrastructure.

As young men and other working-age individuals migrate to cities to work in factories, construction and services, most elders and children, and many women responsible for their care, remain in the countryside. Consequently, they do not have access to high-wage employment and are unable to sustain labour-intensive agricultural production. This limits their income and the possibility for thriving rural communities. Since the mid-1990s, these people began to be identified as those “left behind” in the countryside, denoting not only the fact they remain in the villages, but also the perception of them as “left behind” in the process of modernisation and development itself.

Since the 2000s, the characteristics and plight of these “left behind” people have become the focus of much scholarship. This has contributed to promoting various government policies to address the predicament of these people and the “hollow villages” where they remain. This is admirable for bringing much-needed public resources to address the problems that come about through increasing rural–urban inequality. However, this scholarship and much of its influence on policy has important limitations, and may even be counterproductive. So, we need another framework. My research builds upon feminist critiques of the exploitation of rural women, and calls for deeper engagement with critical gender studies in China.

The feminisation of farming

First, we should note that, as migrant workers flocked to the cities, women began to take over more and more responsibility for farming and rural life. This phenomenon occurs worldwide, and has been called the “feminisation of farming”. In China, however, powerful voices promoting neoliberal discourses and patriarchal assumptions (mainly in economics, political science and sociology) questioned the growing share of female labour in Chinese agriculture. Female agricultural work was largely invisible for them, because much of it focuses on household subsistence and other forms of unpaid, non-cash, home-based labour. But as more research emerged, those critics were forced to accept this fact in China as well. Thus, promoting mainstream recognition of the “feminisation of agriculture” has been an important contribution to scholarship on “left behind” women in China.

However, we can and should advance far beyond this discussion to recognise how rural women are not merely passive victims during these transformations. After all, the very concept of “left behind” populations, and the fixated emphasis of scholarship on the suffering and abandonment of these people, promotes a certain discourse of victimisation that makes their agency invisible and their initiatives unimportant, and may even appropriate their self-empowerment efforts. This does not mean that scholars who research “left behind” people are the cause of their suffering, or that their intentions are not honourable. But to go beyond merely lamenting the plight of the “left behind”, we must revise the basic concepts we use to understand this problem.

I argue we must shift the focus on rural women from “left behind” to “leaders” in various initiatives against displacement, marginalisation and discrimination, and in defence of food safety, food sovereignty and a healthy and thriving countryside. As stated by the special rapporteur on the right to food at the United Nations, Olivier de Schutter: “The most effective strategies to empower women who tend farm and family – and to alleviate hunger in the process – are to remove the obstacles that hinder them from taking charge of their lives.” But this requires, first of all, recognising their efforts to control their own lives, and treating them as leaders in these socio-ecological initiatives.

Female leadership in agriculture

The bottom-up responses to China’s unfolding food safety crisis provide a good foundation for developing this new framework. The expansion of organic or “green” food production for “community supported agriculture” (CSA) projects and other “alternative food networks” in China features several women as their most prominent leaders. This is notably the case, for example, with the Shared Harvest initiative, led by Shi Yan, as well as the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market, led by Chang Tianle. They are both young, well-educated women playing leading roles in the development of an organic and agroecological movement in China. China’s most successful ecological agriculture cooperative, Puhan, was founded by Zheng Bing, a rural school teacher known as the “farming godmother” of China. Puhan is led mostly by women.

Powerful examples are also evident in the collaborations between female scholars and peasant communities. Professor Song Yiching of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has been a pioneer in co-organising organic seed production initiatives in partnership with rural cooperatives in Guangxi, which are primarily led by and composed of women. Similarly, Professor He Huili from the China Agricultural University was instrumental in the establishment of one of China’s earliest and most famous “pollution free” rice production initiatives. After her collaboration in that project, she founded the grassroots Hongnong Academy in Henan province, offering a combination of cultural education, rural health care and agricultural training projects in which women are the main organisers and participants.

In my four years of doctoral research on bottom-up food safety initiatives in the villages where professors Song and He worked, I documented how the success of the organic food cooperative in Guangxi resulted not only from Professor Song’s support, but most importantly because of the strong character of Lu Rongyan, the female village leader, and the proactive engagement of multiple peasant women. The Hongnong Academy in Henan is a good example not simply because of Professor He’s leadership, but primarily because it is already transforming young, timid and stigmatised rural women into vocal and dynamic community leaders themselves.

Lu Rongyan sharing her seed-breeding experiences (Source: Zhang Li)

Lu Rongyan sharing her seed-breeding experiences (Source: Zhang Li)

In highlighting these instances of female leadership, I am not suggesting all ecological agriculture and food sovereignty initiatives in China are established and led by women. I am not pretending these endeavours are perfect. Nor am I saying they only unfold through the hands of well-educated women. In fact, the majority of organic food production in China takes place quietly in countless small gardens and marginal lands alongside cash-crop fields, under the caring hands of millions of peasant women. Their “double burden” of working in the fields and taking care of the household, which they even extend through gifts of food to their children and family networks who migrate to the cities, entrusts to them the responsibility for and leadership over a massive bottom-up self-protection movement against the food-safety crisis.

These unsung heroines of China’s countryside deserve and need more than pity and stigmatisation. They ought to be recognised, encouraged and supported in their efforts to sustain organic farming, cultivate alternative food networks and empower themselves through their own agency.

Beyond ‘left behind’

The concept of “left behind” women, children and elders has become a staple of mainstream media discussions about rural China, and it has gained a firm place in academic literature. However, its stigmatisation and victimisation conceal the agency of these individuals. Therefore, we must move beyond descriptive critiques to cultivate more fruitful frameworks that recognise how these individuals struggle against rural–urban inequalities, and contribute to deep social and ecological transformations. Rather than “left behind”, peasant women are leaders in the much-needed agroecological transformation of China.

 

The article can be found here in Chinese, and here in English.