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ABSTRACT
As projects of commodification and environmental protection converge, it is crucial to understand how authoritarian states attempt to secure commodities, conservation, and control in internal peripheries. We examine how state authorities in China have incorporated walnut cultivation into a project of ‘building ecological civilization’ that links rural development with environmental protection and national security priorities, drawing on fieldwork in rural communities to show how local state agents and smallholders met efforts to promote walnuts. This unconventional crop boom – state-driven, centered on a traditional crop, without dispossession – sputtered amid global market fluctuations, local capital constraints, and friction with cultivators and landscapes.
Acknowledgments
We thank Mindi Schneider, Philip McMichael, and three anonymous reviewers for comments that challenged us to rethink and clarify our arguments. Any remaining defects are, of course, our own. We are also deeply grateful to the villagers who let us into their homes and farms, sharing their time and experiences with us. This research was conducted with support from the National Science Foundation, award number SMA-1415028, from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, award number 41661144002, and from the Ministry of Education of China, award number 16JJD850015. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in 2018.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Note that the emphasis here on autonomy vis-à-vis capital differs somewhat from Evans’ (Citation1995) sense, which emphasizes checks on arbitrary conduct.
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John Aloysius Zinda
John Aloysius Zinda is Assistant Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. He studies how people in rural communities respond to environmental and developmental interventions and the consequences for social and environmental change, with a focus on land management in southwestern China. He also examines individual and collective responses to disaster risk.
Jun He
Professor Jun He is an environmental social scientist with specialization in Human Ecology, at the School of Ethnology and Sociology, Yunnan University, China. His research interests lie in global value chain, indigenous knowledge, Non-timber forest Products, agroforestry and forest governance.