Residual Governmentality: Pesticide Policing in Neo-socialist China

Abstract

This article examines how food safety is policed between Shanghai and the primary site of vegetable production in its food supply chain, Lanling, in order to illuminate how neo-socialist governmentality works in contemporary China. I describe the policing web that has taken shape since 2009 as a means of regulating pesticide residues in agri-products. Following Foucault, I analyse this as a form of governmentality, operating through technologies (of surveillance and measurement) and habits (of food producers, distributors and users). I argue that it is critical to understand connections between the biological residues of production (pesticides) and the political residues that influence the processes of distribution and consumption (cultural forms of social trust allowing collective resistance to state regulation). Such intervention draws particular attention to the making of commons and community commitment which, I argue, clearly distinguish China’s neo-socialist biopolitics from neoliberal strategies practised in other places.

Keywords:

• Pesticide Residues
• Food Safety
• Governmentality
• Policing Web
• China

Acknowledgements

I owe special thanks to Jeffrey T. Martin, for his patient guidance, enthusiastic encouragement and useful critiques of this research work. I would also like to thank Andrew Orta, Zsuzsa Gille, Sacha Cody, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the earlier drafts of this article. My grateful thanks are also extended to Diana Glazebrook for her editorial help. All remaining flaws are of course my own responsibility.

Notes

1 All non-English terms are in Mandarin.

2 I ground my theoretical conversation in a Foucauldian approach to governance and policing in which the terms policing and governing can be used interchangeably.

3 Canshan is the former name of Lanling.

4 In China, nong an ban is usually a subordinate department of the agriculture bureau at county level. But in Lanling, due to the significance of the vegetable industry, nong an ban is set up as an independent bureau parallel to the agriculture bureau.

5 In China, ‘sustainable vegetable’ fall into three major categories: ‘hazard-free vegetable’ (wugonghai shucai), ‘green vegetable’ (lüse shucai) and ‘organic vegetable’ (youji shucai). Hazard-free vegetable is produced ‘using chemical pesticides and fertilisers that are applied in quantities that meet or fall below maximum accepted limits’ (Cody 2019, 89); organic vegetable is grown free of chemicals with official certification; and green vegetable ‘lies halfway between conventional chemical agriculture and chemical-free organic farming’, which ‘is produced with a controlled and reduced use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers and has a testing process to check for residues’ (Cody 2019, 90).

Additional information

Funding

Thanks to Sixth Tone and Department of Anthropology, UIUC, for research grant support.