State-Directed Capitalist Agrarian Change in the Creation of China’s Biggest Tea County: Integrating Capital and Labor in Meitan County, Guizhou

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the reconstruction of a county tea industry in order to help map capitalist agrarian change in contemporary China. The concentration of the tea industry in Meitan County, Guizhou, that began in the 1930s was further centralized under a state-owned farm and factory after 1949. Following the 1990s decline of the state-owned industry, the tea industry reemerged in a new form under a process of state-directed capitalist agrarian change in the early 2000s. Contemporary Meitan’s almost 500 independent tea processors market their products to the changing tastes of Chinese consumers. With an increased attention to tea “quality,” capitalist processors have had to take greater control over the labor process of farmers. Thus the industry has taken on a complex structure through a process of vertically integrating tea growers and processors, making use of a county tea producers association, dragonhead enterprises, specialized cooperatives, contract farming, and new property forms.

KEYWORDS:

• Tea
• China
• Guizhou
• labor
• capitalist agrarian change
• quality

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the China Tea Industrialization Museum in Meitan and the county’s tea historians, who made my research there possible, with special thanks to Zhou Kaixun. Thanks also to Mindi Schneider and Ling Zhang for their editorial comments and organization of this project, and to the other participants of the original workshop and this special issue. This article is dedicated to Elizabeth Lord, a generous and thoughtful scholar who shaped its writing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This essay is part of a book project on the creation of the tea industry in Meitan and agricultural modernization from the 1920s to the present. It is based on archival research and four research trips to Meitan in which I interviewed tea farmers, processors, and government officials. For more on this project see Schneider, “Working the Rural-Urban Divide.”

2. Lü, “Guizhou, Meitan.”

3. A mu is equal to one fifteenth of a hectare.

4. Gardella, Harvesting mountains; Liu, Tea Wars.

5. Tea comes from a single plant (Camellia Sinensis), but differences in processing creates a multitude of varieties of drinkable teas. Of the six classical types of tea in China, four are produced in Meitan in any quantity. Meitan processors mainly produce green teas (lücha) and black teas (hongcha) – both being well-known outside of China. Green tea is processed immediately after picking so that the enzymatic oxidation process never really starts, allowing the tea leaves to remain green. Black tea (“red tea” in Chinese) is a fully oxidized tea, producing a red liquor and dark leaves. Some Meitan processors also produce dark teas (heicha) and white teas (baicha). Dark tea (“black” in Chinese) is an oxidized and fermented form of tea, producing a dark liquor and leaf; shou or ripe Puer tea from Yunnan is the most famous dark tea. White tea (baicha) – the least known outside of China – lightly oxidizes as the leaves are left to naturally sun dry in a simple form of processing. All are referenced in this article.

6. See Day and Schneider, “End of Alternatives?” for a detailed history of this transformation.

7. For discussions of “problem of nature” and capitalist accumulation, see Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman, “Industrial Dynamics;” and, Haug, “The capitalist metabolism.”

8. Marx refers to this as the “valorization process.”

9. For example, that tea plants have a life cycle that includes a period in which they are not productive; that the weather or disease can effect production; that there are seasons to the productivity of tea leaves; that the chemical compounds of the tea leaf changes with the age of the leaf; that the temperature and humidity at the time of picking and processing effects the process, or, that certain cultivars are better for producing certain types of tea but not others. This means that unlike the widget factory, tea processing plants and their labor also have production seasons.

10. In fact, chanyehua is often translated as “integration” or “vertical integration” in English.

11. The experimentation with forms of integration since the late 1930s in Meitan is part of the history of agricultural modernization of the tea industry, and this forms the main subject of the larger study of which this article is a part. “Agricultural modernization” (nongye xiandaihua), a category used in China throughout this period, is a larger historical process that includes integration, specialization, standardization, scale-up, and technological improvement all aiming at more efficient agricultural production.

12. For Meitan tea production, in contrast to the agricultural production discussed in Yeh (this volume), land fragmentation is not a large issue.

13. On capitalist agrarian change in China, see Yan and Chen, “Agrarian Capitalization without Capitalism?;” Zhang, “The Political Economy of Contract Farming;” Zhang and Donaldson, “From Peasants to Farmers;” Zhang, Oya, and Ye, “Bringing Agriculture Back In;” Huang, “China’s Hidden Agricultural Revolution;” and Day and Schneider, “The end of alternatives?”

14. Here I just sketch the first period of integration and the period of disintegration, which will be covered in more depth in future works. The focus of this paper is on the second period of integration from the late 1990s on.

15. Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, 111.

16. Liu, Tea Wars.

17. Gardella, Harvesting Mountains, 111.

18. Gardella, Harvesting Mountains; Liu, Tea Wars.

19. Zhang, Guizhou chaye keji, 10; Zhou, Cha de tucheng.

20. Zhang, Guizhou chaye keji, 10-11; Zhou, Cha de tucheng, 35.

21. Ma, Fengyu liushizai, 2.

22. For example, a no-till cropping pattern innovated in Meitan, which reduced the labor needed for production, spread nationally beginning in the 1970s.

23. CCDAS 50-1958-3, p. 2. CCDAS are the documents of Meitan chachang danganshi.

24. For the role of women as tea pickers in the Imperial Era, see Lu, “Beyond the Paradigm.”

25. Forster, “The Strange Tale.”

26. Guizhousheng Meitanxian, Meitan xianzhi, 1993, 438.

27. Ibid., 417-18.

28. Ibid., 219.

29. Guizhousheng Meitanxian, Meitan Xianzhi, 2011, 382.

30. Ibid., 386.

31. Forster and Etherington, “Faltering Change,” 168.

32. Ibid., 168.

33. Puer tea was considered a cheap tea before the 1990s, but around the 1997 Hong Kong handover Hong Kong dealers began to sell their stocks and the market boomed. Puer tea prices rose dramatically and puer even became an investment commodity (Hung, Tea production, 13-15).

34. Tea prices took a hit with Xi’s anti-bribery campaign. See Lanyon, “China’s premium-tea prices.”

35. Intergovernmental Group on Tea, Demand analysis and Market report.

36. See, also, Gale and Huang, “Demand for food quantity and quality;” and, Huang, “China’s Hidden Agricultural Revolution.”

37. See Banaji, “Merchant Capitalism,” for a discussion of this contrast.

38. On the importance of the state for this integration process, see ibid., 412; and, Bernstein, “Notes on capital and peasantry,” 70.

39. Dragonhead enterprises are firms that are supposed help lead famers to modernize agriculture with contracts for inputs and/or specified production methods for outputs. They receive state subsidies and tax breaks. See Schneider, “Dragon head enterprises and the state of agribusiness in China.”

40. Guizhousheng Meitanxian, Meitan Xianzhi, 2011, 380.

41. Lü, “Guizhou, Meitan.”

42. Chen, “How Has the Abolition of Agricultural Taxes;” Day, “A century of rural self-governance reforms;” Day and Schneider, “End of Alternatives?;” He, Xiangcun de qiantu; and, Zhong, “Towards China’s urban–rural integration.”

43. Day and Schneider, “End of Alternatives?;” Chen, “How Has the Abolition of Agricultural Taxes;” and, He, “Lun xiangcun zhili neijuanhua.”

44. Ahlers and Schubert “Building a New Socialist Countryside;” Perry, “From mass campaigns;” Ye and Christiansen, “China’s urban–rural integration policies;” and, Zhong, “Towards China’s urban–rural integration.”

45. For provincial policies, see Li, Guizhou jiakuai chachanye.

46. Guizhousheng Meitanxian, Meitan Xianzhi, 2011 380.

47. Zhang and Donaldson, “From Peasants to Farmers.”

48. Zhang, “The Political Economy of Contract Farming,” 3.

49. Ibid., 3.

50. Banaji, “Merchant Capitalism,” 413.

51. This distinction is Chayanov’s; see Banaji, “Merchant Capitalism,” 419.

52. Zhang, “The Political Economy of Contract Farming,” 4-5.

53. Trappel, Chinas agrarian transition; Unger, The transformation of rural China; and, Zhang and Donaldson, “From Peasants to Farmers.”

54. This includes 390 registered companies (including 4 national-level dragonheads, 22 provincial-level, 17 city-level) and 148 small-scale processers or big household processors. See Lü, “Guizhou Meitan.”

55. Meiri Jingji Xinwen, “Ruixing kafei.”

56. Depending on the season, younger leaves can be worth over ten times as much as cucha.

57. Luo, Zunyi chachanye, 76-9.

58. On food safety, production categorization, and consumption tastes, see Klein, “Everyday Approaches to Food Safety” and “Eating Green.”

59. See Huang, “The rise and fall of middle farmers,” and, Tan and Ding, “The Promotion of Tea in South China.”

60. See Day and Schneider, “The End of Alternatives?”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander F. Day

Alexander F. Day is associate professor of history and chair of East Asian studies at Occidental College Los Angeles, USA. He is the author of The Peasant in Postsocialist China: History, Politics, and Capitalism (2013) and is currently writing a book on the transformation of tea production in Meitan from the 1920s through to the present.