Close
Home
Collections
Login
USC Login
Register
0
Selected
Invert selection
Deselect all
Deselect all
Click here to refresh results
Click here to refresh results
USC
/
Digital Library
/
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
/
Agricultural informatization and agrarian power dynamics in rural China
(USC Thesis Other)
Agricultural informatization and agrarian power dynamics in rural China
PDF
Download
Share
Open document
Flip pages
Contact Us
Contact Us
Copy asset link
Request this asset
Transcript (if available)
Content
i
AGRICULTURAL INFORMATIZATION AND AGRARIAN POWER DYNAMICS IN
RURAL CHINA
by
Wei Wang
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)
August 2018
Copyright 2018 Wei Wang
ii
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all of those who have helped me with this dissertation project. My
advisors, Prof. Tom Goodnight and Prof. Yu Hong have provided me steadfast support. When I
began to conceive my dissertation topic, I only had a vague idea that I wanted to study
information technologies and the agriculture sector in China. This vague idea would not have
grown to a convincing prospectus and finally this dissertation without their insights. Our
conversations about my field observations generated analytical threads in dialogue with theories.
This process of writing my dissertation guided me through the terrains of theories and empirical
fieldwork.
My sincere gratitude also goes to my committee members, Prof. François Bar and Prof.
Guobin Yang as well as my qualifying exam committee member, Prof. Sandra Ball-Rokeach. I
have had the privilege to learn from their expertise, ranging from development theories, China
studies, and media effect theories. This privilege is what I have enjoyed at Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism at USC. Annenberg is one of the most dynamic communication
schools in the world. As a PhD student, I was thrilled to explore a variety of courses provided by
the school. The world-class, diverse faculty here at Annenberg taught me what communication
should be and how to become a good and responsible communication scholar. The philosophy of
Annenberg to encourage everyone to explore around nurtured my research interests.
It is also at Annenberg that I have got to know my best friends and colleagues. I thank
Bei Yan, Nahoi Koo, Prawit Thainiyon, Lin Zhang, Chi Zhang, Xin Wang, Yue Yang, Yao Sun,
Runqin Ren, and all of those who have helped me through this journey.
iii
Last but not the least, I thank my parents for their unconditional support. They are also
my role models. I have known from them since I was very young that learning is a lifelong
process. I have been deeply inspired by them. This dissertation is dedicated to them.
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures x
Abstract xi
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
1. Agriculture in China 4
2. Literature Review 8
2.1 Agrarian Change, Production Relations, and Power from a Marxist View 8
2.1.1 From Marx to Lenin and Chayanov. 8
2.1.2 From farming to agriculture: The glocalized agriculture sector and
industrial capitalism. 10
2.1.3 Urban-rural relations and the glocalized agriculture sector. 12
2.2 Rural China: Agricultural Crisis and Economic Restructuring 13
2.2.1 Changing rural China. 13
2.2.2 Differentiation between agribusiness and small farmers. 15
2.3 Informatization, Agrarian Change, and Power Relations 18
2.3.1 An overview of informatization. 18
2.3.2 Information society and the transformation of social structures. 19
2.3.3 Agriculture under informatization: A developmental perspective and
an institutional economics perspective. 22
2.3.4 Agriculture under informatization: Power and social structure
perspective. 24
2.4 The Political Economy of ICTs 26
v
2.5 Rural China: Informatization for Agricultural Restructuring 28
2.5.1 Agricultural restructuring 28
2.5.2 Studies on agricultural informatization in China 31
3. Conceptual Tools to Agrarian Power Relations in Two Cases 32
3.1 Rationale 32
3.2 Power 33
3.3 Power and Rural China 36
3.4 Framework for This Dissertation 37
4. Methods and Data 40
Chapter 2: The Making of an Agricultural IoT town 45
Introduction 45
1. D town, Grapes, and the IoT town 46
1.1 The Signature “Grape Festival” 46
1.2 Grapes in China 48
1.3 D Town as the Internet of Things Town 49
2. Anhui and Agricultural Inforamtization 51
3. Longcom, the Internet of Things, and the Internet of Things in Agriculture 55
3.1 Longcom: The Internet of Things Company 55
3.2 The Internet of Things 57
3.3 Agricultural IoT in Policy 62
3.4 Speculative Realism and the Rise of Agtech Companies 64
3.5 The Transnational Green Connection 65
3.6 The IoT Self-Fulfiling Prophecy and the Agriculture Sector 67
vi
4. The Proposal of Establishing an Agricultural IoT town 71
4.1 D Town as the Chosen Site 71
4.2 The Invisible Players 74
4.3 The State Initiatives with Agricultural Technology Companies 77
5. Conclusion: The Global Digital Economy and the Agricultural IoT Hype 80
Chapter 3: The Agricultural IoT Town and Localized Digital Hegemony 83
Introduction 83
1. The IoT Vineyards vs non-IoT Vineyards 84
1.1 IoT Solutions for the Grape Industry 84
1.2 Longcom and Its IoT system 86
2. Localized Digital Hegemony and Consent Making in the Vineyard 88
2.1 Hegemony and the Digital 88
2.2 The Smart Fertigation System 89
2.3 Consent-making at the Vineyard and Labor Process Theory 91
2.4 The Labor Control Regime 94
2.5 The Central Control Room and Mobile Terminals 96
2.6 The Quality Tracing System 97
3. The Hegemony and Digital (Dis)connectedness 98
3.1 Agriculture as an IoT Spectacle 98
3.2 Agriculture as a Media Spectacle 101
3.3 Differing Official Endorsement 102
3.4 Flawed Humans Vs Flawless Technologies 103
4. Counter-Hegemony 105
vii
4.1 An Overview of Counter-Hegemony 105
4.2 Personal Relations (producer to consumer links) 107
4.3 The Use of Mobile Payment Technologies 109
4.4 The Grassroots Sentiment – Deconstructing Official Rhetoric 110
5. Conclusion: The Global Digital Economy and the Localized Digital Hegemony 112
Chapter 4: A Responsive State and the Rise of E-commerce in Agriculture 114
Introduction 114
1. E-commerce and Agricultural E-commerce 115
1.1 E-commerce and the China miracle 115
1.2 Agricultural E-commerce 117
2. The Penetrating of Platform-based E-commerce in Rural Areas 120
3. Anhui and Agricultural E-commerce Initiatives 127
3.1 Anhui and the provincial level policy 127
3.2 Nanban county and Fengyi township: The Agricultural Pattern 128
3.3 The Bottom-up Initiatives, Responded and Appropriated by State Power 128
4. From a Family Farm to a Successful Startup Agricultural Company 130
4.1 The Beginning of the Story 130
4.2 Business Growth 131
4.3 Platform: Online Imperialism and Offline Infrastructure as a Great Leap
Forward 132
4.3.1 Platform setting the rules 132
4.3.2 The trajectory of China’s e-commerce platforms 135
5. The Responsive State in a Platform-based Market Economy 137
viii
Chapter 5: The Networked Agriculture and Information Elites 143
Introduction 143
1. The Local Story 143
2. Networked Agriculture 147
2.1 Parallels with Contract Farming 147
2.2 Emerging Networks 149
2.3 The Glue of the Networked Agriculture 151
2.3.1 Governmental Facilitation 151
2.3.2 Existing Social Ties 152
3. Agriculture and Power Relations 154
3.1 Pre-production Decision Making 157
3.2 The Division of Labor in the Production Stage 158
3.3 Market Access in the Post-production Stage 159
3.4 Flexible Accumulation and Uncertainty Management 161
3.5 Digital Visibility 163
3.6 Official endorsement 164
4. A New Form of Differentiation 165
4.1 Differentiation 165
4.2 Information Elites 168
4.3 E-commerce Literacy 169
5. Conclusion 171
Chapter 6: Conclusion 173
1. Research Findings 175
ix
1.1 Chapter Outline 175
1.2 Discussion 177
2. Implications and Contributions 179
3. Methods Reflection, Limitations, and Future Research Directions 181
References 185
x
List of Figures
Figure 1.1. The Conceptual Tool for the Second Case
Figure 2.1. Number of Agricultural IoT Companies by Year
Figure 5.1. The Agricultural Supply Chain
Figure 5.2. The Conceptual Tool for the Second Case
xi
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) and e-commerce platforms in rural China provide the broad
context for my inquiry into communication practices. Particularly, I seek to understand how the
socially shaped projects of agricultural informatization impact the power structures among
stakeholders at the local level. Specific political economic outcomes appear to be generated by
distinctive modes of agricultural informatization. These modes of connecting farm areas, the
state, and information technologies generate identifiable types of power structures and social
change. From my work in the field, I found two modes of social accommodation. In the first,
agricultural informatization works as a top down Internet of Things (IoT) project. The IoT is
initiated and implemented by an agricultural technology company with state support. This first
mode creates an advantage for the new company over the conventional agricultural producers. A
social gap is created. The second case study reports on a bottom up mode of informatization. In
this case, small farmers participate in social e-commerce within a platform economy that
interconnects farmers, laborers, and consumers. I observed differences among small farmers who
practiced e-commerce. Some had digital experience, training, and skills. Others did not. Farmers
and laborers networked widely, but very few became informationally competent figures.
Information elites appear to achieve success based on demand for local goods and tourism; but,
the elites are subject to stresses induced by platform changes. Thus, this dissertation reflects on
the digital landscape where government-preferred private, corporate interests drive economic
agricultural activities and frame development schemas. This study provides a route to
communication inquiry that opens and assembles questions in sociology, political economy, and
forms of rural life. The issue of social outcomes is necessary for assessing emergent relationships
among farm enterprises.
1
Chapter 1: Introduction
This study investigates how the socially shaped projects of agricultural informatization
impact the power structures among different stakeholders at the local level. Agricultural
informatization, in my study, refers to incorporating information and communication
technologies (ICTs) into agricultural practices. These practices include but are not limited to pre-
production planning, production, transaction, and post-harvest management. The technologies
that infuse the agriculture sector range from landlines, cell phones, sensor systems to Big Data
and the Internet of Things (IoT). Given the multiplicity of agricultural practices and technologies,
there is coming into being a spectrum of agricultural informatization modes.
The modes of relationship among information technologies and society change and are
changing agricultural ways of doing things in China. This study examines two recent modes that
I observed in the field (2016-2018). In each of these two cases, I observed that specific political
economic conditions result in a distinctive mode of agricultural informatization, which in turn
generates an identifiable type of power structure and social change. In the first mode, agricultural
informatization unfolds as a top down IoT project initiated by both the state and an agricultural
technology company. The IoT in agriculture mainly consists of the following arrangements of
technologies: crop growth management, data collection, data analysis, and data management
systems. The second case study reports on a bottom up mode in which small farmers participate
in social e-commerce within a platform economy. The predominance of social e-commerce
platforms, like Taobao and WeChat e-commerce, nurture facilitating infrastructures for small
farmer participation.
These two modes are not exhaustive, of course. Rather, the two examples occupy
positions along the spectrum of agricultural informatization. I selected them because these two
2
modes exemplify independent ways that agricultural producers appropriate ICTs in rural China.
The first mode represents the prevailing state-corporate alliance in fostering new economic
concepts and markets in China’s economy. The second mode can be found in areas where
oligopolies in the digital platform economy direct economic development through attracting and
enabling the participation of small farmers. In this study, I set up these two modes without taking
into account a mediating, adjacent mode which might mix the characteristics of both the top
down and bottom up modes. The mediating, adjacent mode is very likely to yield a more
complicated and complete picture of socio-techno communicative infrastructures. I will discuss
alternative modes in the final chapter.
The two modes of ICT agriculture result in differentiation of winners and losers among
stakeholders in the local agriculture sector. In the first case, the centralized ownership of the IoT
system by the agricultural technology company, along with the hype created around the IoT,
marginalizes small farmers. In the second case, although e-commerce tools are accessible to
virtually anyone, its platform-centered interests and demands for skilled entrepreneurship benefit
information elites more than regular small farmers.
These outcomes do not imply the deployment of technologies inevitably reinforces social
discrepancy or results in new forms of social differentiation. As my research shows, different
ways of applying and appropriating ICTs impact the local power structure profoundly. Outcomes
vary; pitfalls remain, however, to any capital-driven formations of technological institutions and
communicative infrastructures. New forms of inequality sometimes surface. Or, to put it in a
more dialectical way, new forms of antagonism among different stakeholders rise along the line
of ICTs. This study sets out polar opposing modes to begin research into multiple social and
3
technological mixes coming to characterize agriculture in China and other places around the
globe.
The approach I take to inquire into the impacts of informatization is a sociological
perspective that pursues questions of structure, agency, and technology. Neither a technological
deterministic view nor a political economic examination suffice. Social structures shape
technology uses, while the enabling potential of technologies need to be appreciated. Therefore, I
analyze how agricultural informatization become institutionalized in different ways in two
different rural China locations as well as how agricultural informatization in turn affects social
structures. In this way, the structural view of technologies becomes complemented by
investigation of social change enabled by technologies. My inquiry pursues the agentic potential
of social actors. I work from the hypothesis that the application of agricultural informatization is
not a static process composed of sequential staging. Rather, technology uses and structural
change are always dynamic, unfolding in processes of restless transformations.
The first goal of this project is to provide a political economic analysis of agricultural
informatization in China. Through analyzing two modes of agricultural informatization, I want to
demonstrate how different political economic conditions shape technology adoption and
practices. The second goal is to probe the impact of informatization on the relations between
different social groups, including independent smallholding farmers, agribusiness, agricultural
technology companies, and local governments, in the agriculture sector in rural China.
The study aims to document the social impact of technologies in two rural areas. It
conceives the focus of research from a class perspective, categorizing the social actors into small
farmers, agribusiness, the state, and other. The overarching research question addresses how
informatization has transformed the relations between these social groups, which I term as
4
agrarian power dynamics. Through such an analysis, I further dissect the transformation that the
agriculture sector and villages have experienced. I discuss selected villages and rural areas.
A note on this chapter’s organization and study design is in order. This chapter opens up
the inquiry into the subject matter. It explains the rationale of this dissertation project. I situate
my inquiry in the context of a digital age when information and communication technologies are
entangled with our life. The first section of this chapter depicts the agriculture sector in rural
China. The bulk of this chapter is a review of literatures that underpin my research questions and
framework. The literature review section begins with a general examination of changing
agricultural practices. It describes different strands of research on ICTs and agriculture. Chapter
one continues and demonstrates how the Chinese state prioritizes agricultural informatization as
a national focus to upgrade the agriculture sector. I then explain the rationale of this research
project, highlighting why I raise my key research questions. After the literature review, I propose
two orientations for my research questions. I develop a political economic perspective to study
the structural forces that shape the project of agricultural informatization. Then, I propose
conceptual frameworks to explicate the power dynamics among agricultural stakeholders. The
last a few pages of this chapter introduce the details of my methods and data.
1. Agriculture in China
The vast agriculture sector in China is experiencing profound transformation at a new
historical juncture. The ever faster pace of urbanization and industrialization imposes intensive
pressures on rural areas and the agriculture sector. Phillip Huang and Yusheng Peng (2007)
identify three historical trends that contextualize agricultural change. These include the rising
size of non-agriculture employment, the declining rate of population growth, and the changing
structure of food consumption. These trends impact how food is grown, how agricultural produce
5
is processed and transacted, and how the agricultural sector is regulated. Meanwhile, ineffective
resource utilization and resource constraints, together with food safety issues, impel China to
restructure agricultural development models. Making agricultural production greener and making
products safer have become the new pursuit.
Under these conditions, the Chinese state aims to deepen agricultural modernization.
Agricultural informatization is the most up to date measure that the state adopts to further
modernize agriculture. Digital technologies are considered the most advanced stage of
agricultural modernization. These follow the first several stages of modernization that include
building water conservancy (shuilihua 水利化), chemization (huaxuehua 化学化), and
mechanization (jixiehua 机械化).
1
Built on the decade-long policy emphasis on agricultural
technological innovation in rural China, the state has included informatization initiatives into the
“Twelfth Five Year” and “Thirteenth Five Year” plans and prioritized informatization in the
yearly No.1 Documents since 2006. As the 2016 No.1 document states, modern information
technologies, including the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, and mobile Internet
are expected to drive the transformation of the entire supply chain of agriculture.
From the state’s perspective, agricultural informatization is a policy that further
modernizes the agriculture sector. However, the story of agricultural informatization is more
complicated than the state extension of public services to rural China. On the one hand, the
central government and different levels of local governments zealously propagate the idea of
agricultural informatization; on the other hand, private corporations create an abundance of
informatization infrastructures, agricultural digital technologies, agricultural e-commerce, and
1
Much to do with agirucltural informatization (nongye xinxihua dayoukewei 农业信息化大有可为).
Accessed from http://business.sohu.com/20160831/n466952177.shtml.
6
similar platforms by telecommunication companies, Internet companies, agricultural technology
companies, and research institutes. Telecommunication companies provide both infrastructural
buildup and content services. For example, in Shandong, the provincial agriculture department
and the Shandong branch of China Mobile signed a contract of “co-boosting ‘Internet Plus’
modern agriculture cooperation” (gongtong tuijin ‘hulianwang+’ xiandai nongye hezuo xieyi) to
advance agricultural informatization in seven ways. They initiated training sessions to help
farmers familiarize themselves with mobile applications designed by China mobile which
provide agricultural information and facilitate e-commerce.
2
Urban-based corporations also
venture into the blue sea of agricultural informatization and market their products and services to
rural areas.
3
Dan Schiller (2014) coined the term, the “Chinese variant of state-led digital capitalism.”
Digital capitalism occurs when the state spearheads the expansion of a mode of investment that
centers around digital networking technologies. The Chinese state assumes multiple roles besides
paving way for digital capitalism striding between serving private corporate interests and
providing public services, between domestic rural development and transnational networking,
(e.g., Hong, 2017; Zhao, 2008; Zhao and Schiller, 2001). There are moments of state-market
alliance in commercializing agricultural informatization initiatives, but there are also state-
2
Shadong advancing agricultural informatization Sessions on training farmers to use mobile applications
take off (Shandong tuijin nongyexinxihua nongmin shouji yingyong jineng peixun kaike 山东推进农业信息化 农
民手机应用技能培训开课) Accessed from http://www.sd.xinhuanet.com/cj/2017-03/17/c_1120646118.htm
3
e.g., The trillion RMB era of rural e-commerce has arrived; Jingdong and Alibaba has been competing
fiercely with each other (Nongcun dianshang wanyi shidai daolai, dan Jingdong he Ali yici sisha xujiu 农村电商万
亿时代到来, 但京东和阿里已此厮杀许久) Accessed from http://36kr.com/p/5059095.html
7
market tensions in imagining the contours of agricultural informatization.
This development path of agriculture is not neutral. There are winners and loser because
different social groups are benefited or harmed by different outcomes. At the local level,
agricultural informatization can affect the power relations among local bureaucrats, agribusiness,
and small farmers. Will agricultural informatization schemas sustain or transform existing power
relations? Local bureaucrats, bridging the state and the village-level agricultural producers,
assume a critical role in implementing agricultural informatization policies. Agribusiness and
farmers, in tandem and in tension with one another, practice agricultural informatization
technologies for agricultural production and circulation. In each local area, the degree to which
agricultural enterprises conform to the state’s plan of informatization and to which the state is
contested by the re-articulation of top-down initiatives remains obscure.
Agricultural informatization is not a mere assemblage of information and communication
technologies (ICTs). Monitoring of crops, collections of information and projections of
cultivation unleashes the transformative power of information, which occupies a central position
in restructuring production and the relations of production. Agricultural informatization is an
institution of producing and utilizing information, which is shaped by a specific political
economy and is constraining as well as enabling for social actors. Agricultural informatization
depicts the monitor-data-production projects that manage agricultural planting, cultivation,
production, harvesting and distribution. Agricultural informationzaiton modes refer to the
institution of producing and utilizing information in the agriculture sector. These modes involve
different sets of institutional forces that form different habitus for social actors, to use Pierre
Bourdieu (1990)’s signature term. What they have in common is information production and
information transaction constitute the core of these institutional forces and social practices.
8
The informatization initiatives expedite the integration of agriculture into the capitalist
system and into the intricate urban-rural networks. Consequently, the agricultural sector has been
more tightly integrated into the global market than ever. Agricultural products enter into the
global supply chains that characterize a global capitalism (Tsing, 2015). The expansion of
market forces into agriculture is transforming the agricultural landscape in China.
My research strives to uncover the dynamics driven by the tensions in the process of
agricultural transformation under informatization. Through ethnographic inquiry I tease out two
modes of agricultural transformation and how these modes affect agricultural power dynamics.
This study thereby achieves a textured picture of rural China change governed by the state and
agrarian change as a product of varied, distinctive, on-the-ground establishments and uses of
technical systems. The next section provides a review of literatures that inform this dissertation.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Agrarian Change, Production Relations, and Power from a Marxist View
2.1.1 From Marx to Lenin and Chayanov.
Karl Marx (1977) described the formation of a capitalist regime in Britain. He (1977)
identified a profound prerequisite for industrial capitalism, “primitive accumulation.” The
initiating move of capitalism occurred in rural areas when the commons were enclosed for the
privatized production of industrial raw materials. Land owners drove peasants off the lands.
Previous residents earned a livelihood by farming. They lost their means of production and had
to sell their labor to the urban industrial market. Marx conceptualized this process as
“proletarianization” in which peasants and the urban powerless were forced to become a working,
proletariat class.
In the cities, urban capitalists owned the means of industrial production and controlled
9
the labor power of proletariats. Marx defined the relations of production in terms of who owned
the means of production and who controlled others’ labor power. Control of labor furnished the
basis for class formation and differentiation. Marx argued that the ruling class exerted power to
maintain its status over the working class. Besides economic power, Marx found the capitalist
elite wielded political power. The ruling class were able to ideologically shape the working class.
Marx’s notion of power thus centers around class domination and ideological control.
In retrospect, Marx’s observation of agrarian change and his class perspective seem
oversimplified. Yet, these views have well inspired later studies, which developed different
versions of analyses on how industrial capitalism shaped agrarian change and the reshuffling of
rural social structures and production relations in different socio-historical contexts (Bernstein,
2010). The most striking debate is between Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Chayanov. Lenin
(1956[1908]) argued that smallholding family farms would be dissolved by the penetration of
capital. Chayanov (1989) pointed to the resilience of smallholding family farms due to the
unique logic of household production. For Chayanov (1989), population pressure is the main
factor influencing a family’s economic fortunes. The two paths of agrarian transition both have
real-world evidence support, with different regions or different countries developing different
modes. However, these two models represent a choice between teleological and essentialist
thinking. Furthermore, each lacks the capacity to conduct contextual analysis of the variations in
agrarian change across regions in different time periods (Zhang, 2013). The interpenetration of
local and international influences on rural areas creates unique conditions that unfold in varied
contexts. Glocalization refers to the unfolding of multiple trajectories of power within spaces for
living, work, and production. The next subsection reviews how farming is transformed into an
industrial, glocalized agriculture sector.
10
2.1.2 From farming to agriculture: The glocalized agriculture sector and industrial
capitalism.
Henry Bernstein (2010) synthesizes the perspectives of Lenin and Cheyanov. He
acknowledges the potent influence of industrial capitalism, yet looks beyond farming to focus on
the farmers’ agentic strategies. The potent influence of industrial capitalism is reflected more in
the “commodification of subsistence” than in the uniform dissolving of smallholding family
farms in farming.
The arena of farming, according to Bernstein (2010), is dominated by smallholding
family farms. Such holdings persist for several reasons: (1) the lower profit rate of farming
(Bernstein, 2014); (2) the gap between production time and labor time (Mann and Dickinson,
1978); (3) the lower costs associated with petty commodity producers, and the resistance from
them against capital (Bernstein, 2013). In addition, Bernstein (2010) observes that small farmers
do not constitute a monolithic class. The differences among them are no less consequential than
those between farmers and capitalists. Farming households with greater resources may become
petty capitalist producers; but, those with fewer resources can only complement their livelihood
with wage labor. Applying his framework of the relations of production, Bernstein concludes
those who control more properties and resources occupy a better position in the labor-division
hierarchy, therefore making more benefits.
Four basic questions open local spaces to contextual analysis of the “social relations of
production and reproduction” (Bernstein, 2010). “Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets
what? What do they do with it?” (Bernstein, 2010, pp. 22-23). The first question asks who
controls what properties; whether properties are privately or publicly disposed of and managed is
important. The second question taps into the division of labor. The third inquiry pursues
11
distribution of economic reward and other types of gains. The fourth trajectory probes “social
relations of consumption, reproduction and accumulation” (p. 23). Together, contextual analysis
brings into relief relationships among agents, agencies, distributions of work and reward, and the
outcomes of risk and reward.
Globalized industrial capitalism shapes “an agricultural sector,” that spreads to
encompass adjacent activities. Adjacent activities create more forms of labor than farming.
Bernstein (2010) defines “agriculture” or “an agricultural sector” as “farming together with all
those economic interests and their specialized institutions and activities, ‘upstream’ and
‘downstream’ of farming, that affect the activities and reproduction of farmers” (p. 65). The
“commodification of subsistence” means farmers have to “produce their subsistence through
integration into wider social divisions of labour and markets” (Bernstein, 2010, p.4). In non-
farming activities, capitalist companies seek to control seed, chemical, machinery, storage,
transport and other upstreaming raw materials. Capital also profits from downstream processes
like food distribution and circulation.
Ingolf Vogeler (1981)’s interpretation of the changing production relations of agriculture
in the United States describes a similar situation. Vogeler (1981) exposes the power dynamics
between farmers and agribusiness. The local farmers become subordinated to capitalist
oligopolies. Agricultural inputs and outputs are supply chains that profit off of the labor of
farmers and the labor of family farms. In the years after the second World War, agribusiness
came to dominate agriculture in the United States. The sentimental myth of the family farm
began to fade. The campaign of Ronald Reagan championed the family farm as a strategy for
obtaining votes. Then in office, he supported legislation that favored the rapid rise of
agribusiness (Ward, 2015).
12
The changing agriculture sector is closely tied to transformations in cities. The next
subsection discusses the urban-rural links in the globalized agricultural landscape.
2.1.3 Urban-rural relations and the glocalized agriculture sector.
The commodification of farmers’ subsistence derives from the integration of farming into
the industrial capitalist scheme. It reflects the close linkage between the urban-centric capitalist
developmental path and agriculture. The rise of a capitalist agricultural sector is inseparable from
the formation of dynamic cities. For example, William Cronon (1991) documented the growth of
Chicago, where a symbiotic relationship materialized between urban and agricultural sectors.
Grain monoculture, enormous industrial processing of food, improved transportation
infrastructures, financing institutions, and local political power fed the urban consumers and
stimulated urban industries. These transformations revolutionized the agricultural sector, which
was incorporated into a non-local exchange network.
In the late 19
th
and early 20
th
century, cheap crops and industrial products were exported
from developed western countries and poured into developing countries. Trade fundamentally
shook the agricultural and crafting sectors in these rural areas (Lv, 2010). Consequent social
changes included the proletarianization or semi-proletarianization of peasants and other rural
residents, especially in the global south (Lv, 2010). In this sense, in the colonial period, the
countryside in the “developing” nations was pushed to the “peripheral of peripheral”. In these
developing countries, only a few major cities were able to develop industries, albeit shaped by
the Western power. The process took time. It was not until the 1970s that a global market
drastically connected and changed most countries across the globe. The irreversible collapse of
the peasant economy, resulting from the juggernaut of neoliberal policies, in many developing
countries forces rural residents to flood into cities (Davis, 2003; Lv, 2010).
13
In the agricultural sector, transnational companies have increasingly dominated upstream
and downstream farming activities (Bernstein, 2013). The spirit of mass production and
standardized management has swept these companies, which then dramatically alters agricultural
landscapes across the globe. The agricultural sector has been more tightly integrated into the
global market than ever. Agricultural products enter into the global supply chains that furnish an
apparatus of circulation for global capitalism (Tsing, 2015). Global connections multiply; yet,
agriculture’s material ties remain, from the land, water, ecologies tended by laboring farmers,
migrant harvesters, farm families, and local help. This echoes the neologism of glocalization,
which depicts how global and local forces interact. In the agriculture context, the local roots and
global supply chains are intertwined. The matrix of local socio-economic conditions and its
structures of social relations requires interpretation, analysis, and study in the particular
structures of production in glocal contexts.
The power dynamics in agriculture are complicated. The study of rural power requires an
analysis of agriculture as part and parcel of capitalist schemes. Any particular scheme turns on
the intertwined relationship between agriculture and urban sectors as these are influenced by
local areas and by international networks. The study of power vector entails a consideration of a
multitude of players from capitalist family farms, farmers on wage labor, agribusiness,
transnational agricultural technology companies, and the state. The networks of agents and
agencies are changing.
2.2 Rural China: Agricultural Crisis and Economic Restructuring
2.2.1 Changing rural China.
Rural China is a complex, evolving area of inquiry. Any given study is therefore limited
to drawing inferences about relationships that are themselves in a state of transition. The study of
14
general context is important to provide a window into the multiple layers of practice that setup
the strata of contexts for inquiry. In China, the contemporary reform and opening up of local
agriculture commenced by decollectivizing collective farming. The household contract
responsibility system was instituted by the state. In this system, farming land is contracted to
households. Although farming land is owned by village collectives, households, again, are
returned to the unit of agricultural production and circulation (Li, 2009). Collective farming in
almost all villages became history (except in few villages where collective farming has been
retained). The changed structure was claimed to have effectively motivated households and
increased agricultural productivity. A fairly attractive price of grains further protected the
interests of peasants (Huang, 1998).
At the beginning of the reform, from the late 1970s to 1980s, the increased production of
farm labor could support these growing, surplus populations. The welfare inverse in the early
1990s made it impossible for rural households to support the surplus labor (Huang, 1998). More
and more rural residents began to seek job opportunities in the city, signaling the rise of migrant
workers, who hold rural household registration but work in the city.
The Chinese countryside inevitably became part of the global order, shaped by and
shaping the global economy (OECD, 2002). In addition, the opening up policy also strengthened
the economic ties between the countryside and the city. The new features of Chinese life,
exemplified by the consumption behavior of the city, shape the development forms in the
countryside (Webber, 2012). For example, urban consumers have been attracted in increasing
numbers to organic food, which provides opportunities and constraints for rural agricultural
producers.
The consumption preference for agricultural products has changed from grain to meat-fish,
15
vegetable-fruits, egg, and milk. The rising percentage of (more profitable) non-grain products
enables the increase of agricultural profits and of agricultural employment (Huang and Peng,
2007).
All these factors call jointly for the restructuring of agricultural development models to
follow information paths that are smart, efficient, and environment-friendly. The state’s policy
on agricultural has been to further the mechanization or modernization of production. Some rural
studies scholars argue that, the Chinese state considers smallholding farming as the obstacle to
more efficient scale-farming (Huang, 2013, 2015; Yan and Chen, 2015). According to them, the
Chinese state readopted this view after the first social experiment of collective farming in the
Mao era. The state needs to encourage the establishment of capitalist corporations through
adopting policies that favor “dahu” (large-size agricultural producers). For example, land use is
consolidated for enhanced productivity. Urban needs for food and urban capital make such
changes viable for business interests (Huang, 2012, 2015). The division between agribusiness
and small farmers appears growing.
2.2.2 Differentiation between agribusiness and small farmers.
The descriptions of the class composition of the agriculture sector in China vary. Huang
(2012) and He (2015) assert that smallholding household farming still composes most of the
agriculture sector. Drawing inferences from empirical investigations, they argue that
smallholding household farms are resilient, even the onset of agribusiness. Huang, Gao, and
Peng (2012) calculate the percentage of agricultural labor employment as 3% across the nation.
For them, the status of capitalist farming can be measured by managerial households with
agricultural employment. Other scholars see agribusiness winning. Based on an analysis of the
different material forms of development, Michael Webber (2012) hold that capitalist investment
16
are driving social changes in rural China. The corner stone of social change, capital investments
spur “the transformation of the social relations” governing production (Webber, 2012, p.7). Data
shows that working relations have been fundamentally changed since 1995. Investments in the
machinery of farming changes the arrangements of labor which “is the second, social, meaning
of development: the transformation of the social relations that previously governed production”
(Webber, 2012, p.7). Capitalism is not oriented to social organizing. Rather, capital generates
purchases of the machinery of production, thereby constituting “a specific way of producing
goods and services” (p.9). The modernization of farming heralds “the emergence of capitalism”
(Webber, 2012, p.7). Following this line, the rural development of labor becomes reduced to
primitive accumulation.
Modern agricultural labor reproduces class structures, whatever its future. Hairong Yan
(2015) argues the capitalization of China’s agriculture is accompanied by proletarization.
Different from Huang, she identifies the capitalist dimension of family farms and highlights the
integration of both managerial farms and family farms into the capitalist system, like Bernstein’s
read. Family farms do develop, but they are vulnerable, too. Hairong Yan and Yiyuan Chen
(2015) think the state has been facilitating the distinction among peasants and even eliminating
small farmers.
Xinhua Sun’s (2015) case study of a township found the government’s impetus to
transform agriculture pushed class stratification to a new stage. Before 2007, there was
differentiation among family farms with some being the middle class and the others being the
small peasant class. Into this mix comes state investment. The government enables land
concentration and promotes large scale agriculture; thus, agribusiness became dominant. The
move to large farms did not involve all farmers; these efforts excluded small peasants and some
17
middle class peasants, who relied on wage labor to complement livelihood (Sun, 2015).
The mix of state policy and capital investment in large modern farming projects results
in the “commodification of subsistence.” Hangying Chen (2015) found that small farmers have
to directly deal with capitalist systems. Peasants purchase from and sell to agricultural markets.
Buying and selling products intrudes into farming practices and impacts circulation. Capital
siphons land and labor from small farmers. As such, small farmers bear the risks of farming
which capital intentionally avoids. Under this circumstance, class differentiation among farmers
grows and a disruptive gap between capitalists and farmers appears.
Agribusiness or small holding farms? Both exist. Neither dominates. Forrest Zhang (2013)
alerts us to distinctive regional configurations in the mode of agrarian transition. In a study of the
agrarian landscapes in China, Zhang discerned “three different models of agrarian
transition”: independent household production, corporate production, and cooperative
production. Local political economy constitutes the sight in which agricultural producers conduct
transactions. These transactions connect localities with broader supply chains of shipment,
storage, distributions, and sales.
Agrarian change in China thus far has been the subject of critical public review (Zhang et
al., 2015). Chen (2015) directs attention to the arena of agricultural circulation, in isolation from
broader questions of development. Rather than approach agricultural as a closed, single, set
sector, I intend to model the power dynamics among different social groups across the spectrum
of production and supply chain networks of agriculture. The particular mode of connection I
examine is informatization.
18
2.3 Informatization, Agrarian Change, and Power Relations
2.3.1 An overview of informatization.
As with other aspects of contemporary society, the agriculture sector experiences
sweeping power of information technologies. In this section, I map out relevant theories on
informatization and the impact of informatization on agrarian change.
Bernstein found conditions in developing countries that rendered it difficult for capital to
enter into farming. Capital enters agriculture due to changed social, political, economic, and
technological factors. The political and structural barriers that some regions or countries erected
to secure the smallholding farming regime now become invariantly dismantled. For example, in
Japan, the number of small farmers has sharply declined while the number of agribusiness has
doubled since 2000 (Grain, 2015). Modern agricultural technologies have shortened production
time and curtailed related costs. Hence, capital investment flows into the farming sector
(Bernstein, 2013). Labor is purchased, products produced by contractual arrangement. Contract
farming, as a new institutional invention, prevails in developing countries and encourages the
entry and expansion of agribusiness into farming (Glover and Kusterer, 1990; Ian, 2004; Guo et
al., 2007). In the United States, vertical and horizontal integration in the late 1990s led to the
unprecedented concentration of land and capital, crippling the family farm structure (Drabenstott,
1999).
The instruments of industrial farming are optimized by informatization. The mix of data
sensors, information accumulation, software, predictive analytics, and data processing renders
modern techniques of tending to crops more efficient. Digital efficiencies comprise a factor that
now transforms the socio-technological condition of farming in some regions. There is a mix of
good and bad outcomes in redistributing risks and rewards among elite, laboring, and peasant
19
classes.
2.3.2 Information society and the transformation of social structures.
Societies across the planet are going through transformations of communication
infrastructures, networks of labor and production, and social change with a magnitude and scale
of technical upheaval rarely, if ever, seen in recorded time. At the center of these transformations
is the increasingly prominent status of information. Scholars have generally agreed on the pivotal
pertinence of information in every aspect of our society, despite their divergence in subtler
arguments (Webster, 1995).
Information Technologies (ITs) are generators of and always closely related to these
transformations. ITs are technologies that generate, store, transmit, and deploy information. The
convergence of Information and Communication have rebuilt information apparatus of coding,
storage, access, manipulation and use. These are referred to as ICTs. Courtesy of ICTs,
previously scattered regional economies now span distances and connect under the umbrella
phenomenon of globalization. Individuals do enjoy broadened social scope with greater
connectivity.
A decade-long debate regarding whether we have entered a substantially novel era
achieved its climax in the 1980s and 1990s in the western theoretical discussion. Theorists,
fascinated by grand design theories debated with another on the validity of the argument that the
society we now live is an information society which composes a break with the past. Some argue
the current era suffices the claim of an information society, exemplified by Daniel Bell (1976),
Baudrillard (1983), Castells (1996, 1998), and their followers.
Marx identified the means of production and labor power as the criteria for class
differentiation. The Marxist emphasis on class and production, however, was challenged by the
20
scholars of this camp on the postindustrial society, the postmodern society, and the Information
society. For example, Bell (1976) asserts that in an information society, information, instead of
production, “became the control system of the society” (p.301). However, Bell did not consider
information and production were closely intertwined. Generally, scholars who write about post-
industrial society assume information has become critical in the current era, but they do not
accord sufficient attention to researching the political economy of the information society.
The political economy of ICT communication is relevant here. Herbert Schiller (1984)
and David Harvey (1989), for example, insist on the continuities between the past and the
present, particularly when they position the contemporary era along the spectrum of capitalist
development. The rise of these Marxist scholars after the economic avalanche due to oil crisis
called to bring class back in social sciences studies (Burawoy, 1985) into the institutions of
media and the apparatus of communications. The rising prominence of these Marxist scholars
renew and call for development of critical perspectives.
The political economist Herbert Schiller illuminated the intersection of ICTs and
prevailing market values. He discovered that almost all economic sectors unanimously rely on
“commercially-produced information” (Schiller, 1984, p.78). He emphasizes the capitalist
communications that produce information. David Harvey (1989) argues the market-oriented
information economy is a result of the triumph of neoliberal ideologies in the major governments
across the globe. Dan Schiller (1999) observes the digital networks which comprise the
cornerstone of the contemporary economy originated from public service infrastructures.
However, the neoliberal policies turned most public institutions into exploitative corporate
operations and profitable commercial use.
With communications being the foundation of a service economy, information workers
21
compose the majority of the labor force (Bell, 1979; Leadbeater, 1999). The key to career
success is the ability to cash in on information through collecting, analyzing, generating, and
disseminating information (Reich, 1991; Castells, 1996). It is agreed that increasing
informatization marginalizes manual laborers. In developing countries, there exists a gulf
between the employees of industrial IT industries and small farmers (Luce, 2006).
Just as the value of labor is changing, so, too, power among different social groups has
been complicated by the rising dominance of ICTs and the social institution revolving around
ICTs. It has been observed the unprecedented features of ICTs have enabled disruptive ways of
deploying resources to wage collective action, thus alternating existing power structures of
decision-making and interests-distribution. Jafri et al. (2002) contends the poor are abler to
participate in decision-making processes. Decision-making processes are political, in which
different social actors compete (Chapman and Slaymaker, 2002).
The information is playing a key role in the contemporary era is undeniable. However,
who owns the labor of communication, and who uses information gathered from communication
exchange, and what are the legitimate interests are open questions. The answers emerge in the
changing relations of capital, ownership, and labor which together reshape social relations.
The Internet is a dominant communications apparatus. In its initial form, the Internet
appeared as a quasi-utopian promise. Its networks of computers offered the means for rapid
communications with minimal governance across dispersed and adjacent populations. The
transformational promise of communications caught the attention of capital investment and
corporate control of individual exchange. Information is filtered into mass data relevant to sales,
politics, and control (McChesney, 2013). With regards to the Internet, the most advanced form of
information technologies, scholars have focused on five domains of its implications: inequality
22
(the “digital divide”); community and social capital; political participation; organizations and
other economic institutions; and cultural participation and cultural diversity (DiMaggio et al.
2001). When applying this perspective to rural areas and agriculture, most scholarship either
focuses on statistical differences between urban and rural areas, i.e., the digital divide mode, or
the developmental role of information technologies. This study shifts focus from technology
access to technology control and uses to undertake a political economic critique through tracing
implications of technology structures on social inequality. My research thus investigates the
agricultural sector of rural areas, and presents models of how existing political economies shape
agricultural informatization modes and how these modes shape power dynamics.
The next section introduces three different perspectives in studying information
technologies and agriculture, a developmental perspective, an institutional economics
perspective, and a social structure perspective. By laying out these perspectives, I explain and
refine my political economy approach to agrarian power dynamics in the information age.
2.3.3 Agriculture under informatization: A developmental perspective and an
institutional economics perspective.
There have been extensive studies on use of ICTs in agriculture, but it is not clear how
the objects of study appear in terms of social consequences and outcomes. The definition of
agricultural informatization is complicated. Alexander G. Glor (1993) explains this concept as
“all aspects of society - politics, culture, business, economy - become increasingly information-
oriented” and information “becomes the dominant commodity or resource” (p.95).
In studying the impact of informatization on the agriculture sector, there have been two
dominant and far-reaching perspectives. The first one is a developmental perspective and the
second an institutional economics perspective. The developmental perspective draws attention to
23
the potential of ICTs to modernize agriculture and enable relatively backward regions to leapfrog
into advanced production. This orientation rests on the taken-for-granted view that ICTs can lead
to rural and agricultural development (Heeks, 2010; Jensen, 2007; Nayak et al., 2010; Rao, 2007;
Unwin, 2009; von Braun and Torero, 2006). For example, Rao (2007) writes: “Both the range of
the technologies and their convergence with conventional media is expanding all the time. ICTs
can become key enablers of the agri-food sector by making dynamic and real-time global level
exchange of data, information and knowledge quick, interactive and easy throughout the
agricultural value chain” (p.492). Kayak et al. (2010) observes: “Information and
Communication Technology has a vital role in connecting the rural community to outside world
for exchange of information, a basic necessity for economic development. Effective use of ICT
can demolish geographical boundaries and can bring rural communities closer to global
economic systems and be of meaningful help to the underprivileged.” (p.221). In addition, to say
that development requires information, using Veva Leye’s (2009) words, “glosses over the
processes of commodification to which it is subjected” (p.31).
The transformational impacts of rural information development are not taken into account
fully. Jan Pieterse (2005) comments “information-for-development is primarily driven by market
expansion and market deepening” (p.11). Leye (2009) further argues Information and
Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) projects may drain resources away
from other projects that meet local people’s basic needs. The social implications of the expansion
of ICTs into rural areas are understudied (Heeks, 2010). Heeks (2010) has also directed our
attention to the power dynamics within the implementation of ICT4D projects: who can benefit
and how can we equalize the benefits of ICT4D projects to all the local people. The question of
who can benefit from ICTs usage deserves more attention.
24
Institutional economics shifts from development to market equilibrium as its object of
inquiry. This second perspective focuses on the economic systems of ICTs in agriculture.
Through a study of mobile phone use in the fishing industry, Robert Jensen (1997) attributes
“improvements in information” to “the adoption of mobile phones by fishermen and wholesalers,”
which results in “a dramatic reduction in price dispersion, the complete elimination of waste, and
near-perfect adherence to the Law of One Price” (p.879). He finds the advantages of mobile
phone by using traditional economic measures. Harsha de Silva and Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara
(2009) find ICTs can reduce transaction costs, specifically, “the costs associated with
information search” (p.2) in agriculture. It can “enable greater farmer participation in
commercial agriculture as opposed to subsistence farming that continue to force so many farmers
in developing countries in to poverty” (p.2). Like the development view, the institutional
economic approach, despite a more nuanced measurement system, does not attend to the social
consequences of ICTs ownership and labor either.
2.3.4 Agriculture under informatization: Power and social structure perspective.
There has been not much attention to the power dynamics between different social groups
in the agriculture sector undergoing informatization. Alexander G. Glor (1993) highlights the rise
of white-collar agricultural workers under informatization and the relative deprivation of farmers
who conduct direct farming labor. The benefits of informatization programs mainly go into the
pockets of transnational companies and information workers, and information is playing a
critical role in the reaping the benefits of informatization. Jabir Ali and Sushil Kumar (2010) find
that those farmers with bigger farms, better educated, in socially higher classes, and earn higher
income can take more advantage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in
exhibiting a better decision-making quality.
25
Farmers with rising and higher social status reap varying benefits of the application of
ICTs. Rajendra Kumar and Michael Best (2006) found young, male, better educated, and those
with a higher income tend to use telecenters more often than the other users. Telecenters while
providing more localized content for relatively backward communities do change user patterns.
Therefore, they posited a mixed conclusion about telecenters: telecenters may sustain existing
inequalities while opening up new space for progressive change. However, these studies mainly
stay at the user description or a certain aspect, like how telecenters help with decision making for
local farmers, my research aims to trace the micro-macro level countryside power dynamics.
In my project, I retain the Marxist emphasis on the ownership of the means of production
as well as add the “information” dimension. Therefore, I argue that power not only lies on
control of land or monetary capital, but also stems from information resources, information
infrastructures, as well as the ability to harness informational resources.
Previous studies on information technologies, economy development, and rural change
mainly rest on a specific type of technology, e.g., the telephone (Aronson, 1971; Hudson, 1984),
telecenter (Mahmood, 2005; Pick et al., 2013), and the mobile phone (Ahuja et al., 2015; Islam,
2011). Premised on the pervasiveness of information technologies and media convergence, this
study attempts to assess the impact of informatization, which encompasses and goes beyond
specific technologies to the integrating and converging technology level of control, labor, and
production. My inquiry pursues the institutional buildup of agricultural informatization and
regards agricultural informatization as an institution. My inquiry is based upon political
economic studies of ICTs, which I elaborate in the following section.
26
2.4 The Political Economy of ICTs
Political economy as an established discipline and research approach is rooted deeply in
the Marxist tradition, which interrogates the relationship between material production and
productive relations. The central thrust of political economy lies in its concern with power, in
terms of where power comes from, who owns power, and the influence of power (Mosco, 2009;
Schiller, D., 1999, 2014; Schiller H., 1984; McChesney, 2013). Situating political economy
studies in the capitalist society, Marx and Engels exposed how capitalists gained power over the
working class and how the surplus labor of the working class was exploited by capitalists as the
source of accumulation.
The early generation of political economy scholars in the communication field revealed
the process of producing and circulating information in society. They went beyond merely
pointing to the importance of information in current social relations. Herbert Schiller, a
representative political economist illuminated the intersection of our dependence on ICTs and the
market values which prevail, and depicted that almost all the economic sectors unanimously rely
on “commercially-produced informatization” (Schiller, 1984, p.78).
ICT operations are nodes of power that network capital in a post-industrial society.
Societies in transition are not post-industrial. Therefore, the spread of international corporate ICT
structures intersects with varied, situated social and economic relations in post-colonial nations
across the globe. The production of local or national ICT structures, independent of global
capital constitute a cooperative and counter movement. Scholars have probed this line of
research and provided more elaborated analyses of the intersection of politics of economics in
producing information and communication systems, such as who owns institutions, ICTs, and
27
techniques to produce, circulate, and distribute what for whose interests, and have been “critical
of the status quo in theory”(Gandy, 1992).
ICTs are anything but neutral as they are composed of not only infrastructural
foundations, but also technical staff and the like, which are constantly contested by local power
dynamics. Regarding the adoption and deployment of ICTs, communications organizations are
embedded in and shaped by their unique historical trajectory and social context. Who has the
power to make decisions on the adoption and deployment of what types of ICTs for whose
benefits in what ways always merits serious attention (Smythe, 1994; Zhao, 2007). My political
economy approach to China’s agricultural sector constitutes an interrogation of power and
struggle embedded in alternative trajectories driving informatization of farming and its supply
chain networks.
Critique of political economy constructs a counterweight to a celebrant view of
technological change. It is observed advancement in technologies have led to conglomeration in
production and homogenization in content, which further endangers democracy and distorts a
future vista (Mudock & Golding, 1989; McChesney, 2013). Dan Schiller (2000) names the
contemporary capitalist development as digital capitalism, explaining that in the current
neoliberal political-economic climate, governments prioritizing corporate interests accelerate
deregulation and help invent a commercial-interest driven digital sphere.
Study of communications within and across rural areas around the globe is urgent.
Examined in the context of globalization, transnational-corporations expands digital capitalism
and projects the pivotal position of information in contemporary society (Chun, 2013; Hart-
Landsberg, 2013; Hung, 2009; Schiller, 2000). The battle between public interests and private
interests have tilted toward the private side, and public interests are subject to capital operation,
28
which endanger the living and working conditions of the marginalized social groups (Zhao,
2000; Schiller, 2000). Rural societies within different nations offer distinctive mixes of
traditional, modern, and postmodern forms of living, structures of labor, risks of production, and
supply chain opportunities and vulnerabilities. On-the-ground practices offer spaces that invite
observation about the local interpenetrated by global supply chains, circulation of climate,
networked systems, and accumulation. China offers many places where studies in the
information political economies of rural areas can begin. The next section introduces China’s
response to an information economy in the agriculture sector.
2.5 Rural China: Informatization for Agricultural Restructuring
2.5.1 Agricultural restructuring
Contemporary China agricultural policy works out of a conflicted history pitting the
demands of governance against times of harvest with limited success. The Mao era of collective
farming produced disastrous results. Subsequent modernization has taken decades to develop and
remains conflicted (Chan et al., 2009). State efforts include the promotion of large scale-farming
with modern agricultural machinery of production. Village or local farming has been supported
by state policy, too. The major contemporary of restructuring farming is agricultural
informatization. In the official rhetoric, agricultural informatization is considered the important
new force that drives agricultural modernization.
A consecutive 10 years of No. 1 documents were issued by the state council and the
politburo of the CCP. The party proclamation included agricultural informatization as a path to
agricultural modernization. In the No. 1 document in 2016, imperatives for agricultural
informatization were extended and refined. The document locates rural China as the potential site
for increasing domestic consumption and ensuring infrastructural investments. In 2007, the
29
Ministry of Agriculture issued the “Overall Framework for National Agriculture and Rural
Information Construction 2007 - 2015” (Quanguo nongye he nongcun xinxihua jianshe zongti
kuangjia, 全国农业和农村信息化建设总体框架 2007-2015). The state intends to expand
infrastructural investment in rural China, in which informatization operations are a part.
Informatization is anticipated to serve and increase the consumption ability of peasants and
facilitate the consumption ability of urban residents. Informatization is considered the lynchpin
for transforming modes of agricultural development. Following the optimistic upbeat theories of
leapfrog development, the party’s envisions that the integration of information technologies and
traditional agriculture will facilitate only positive outcomes like standarization, smartization,
consolidation, industrialization, and organization of agriculture. The state’s policy brings into
play contradictory forces. In addition to mandating industrialization and scale agriculture, the
policy claims as an objective the improvement of the skills of small farmers and the provision of
necessary public services for them.
Agricultural informatization, differs from traditional modern agriculture imperatives
based on limited communication between local and national levels of industry, finance, and
governance. The possibilities of agricultural transformation have stimulated surprising passion
from telecommunications companies, Internet operations, and agricultural machinery companies.
Critical to use of ICTs is the infrastructural buildup of telecomunications networks. However, the
public service side and the deregulated commercial side of the project of extending
telecommunication networks to rural China exist in ongoing, and developing degrees of tension
with one another. For example, around the turn of the 20th century, the state endorsed the
“universal service” concept, while several major telecommunications operators either evaded the
responsibility to contribute to the “universal service” fund or contested the services to be
30
included (Hong, 2015).
Despite the complex seesaw between different stakeholders, there has been growth in
rural telecommunications infrastructures. For instance, China Mobile undertook to implement the
project of “telephones to every village” initiative in the early 2000s. Telecommunication
networks are expanding rapidly to the countryside.
4
State interventions are accompanied by high profile projects launched by premier,
wealthy Internet companies, such as Alibaba, Jingdong, and Tencent. These provide
informatization services and products. Alibaba, for example, has developed a partnership with
Aike Group in producing agricultural machinery for smart and modern agriculture. Alibaba
intends to couple its cloud computing and big data analytics with development agricultural
machinery and farm services.
Agricultural informatization is propagated as a national project. The outcome of these
partnerships become manifested in alternative configurations within and across provinces and
different prefectural cities. Several provinces and a few prefectural cities are designated to be the
demonstration bases of agricultural information. The telecommunications infrastructures,
Internet companies, and the economic development level of different regions vary, therefore
create different political economies altering social relationships for areas. Such differences invite
the development of a line of critical inquiry where the impacts of informatization on social
relations are examined and assessed.
In this study, I develop strategies of inquiry to investigate the local political economies of
4
China Mobile invested a total of 45 billion RMB for the “telephones to every village” initiative
(Zhongguo yidong “cuncuntong dianhua gongcheng” leiji touru 450 yiyuan 中国移 动 “村村通 电话 工程” 累 计 投
入 450 亿 元). Accessed from http://www.cctime.com/html/2016-3-5/1144667.htm.
31
agriculture information in two local areas of rural China. I am concerned with communications
technologies as they function as the invention of a social project, agricultural informatization. I
develop a way to examine the implication of such a project on social inequality. Before moving
on to my conceptual framework, the next section gives an overview of studies on agricultural
informatization in China.
2.5.2 Studies on agricultural informatization in China
The phenomenal rise of agricultural informatization has received scholarly attention.
There are several lines of research under way. The first speculates on the increasing information
needs of farmers. It considers ICTs as tools leading toward rural development (Qiang et al., 2009;
Xia, 2010). These studies approach agricultural informatization from the policy framework,
evaluating the advantages and deficits of state initiatives, business models, and local
implementation. Another line of research focuses on farmers’ side and the factors that lead to
varied types of technology use. Cara Wallis (2015), for example, has questioned how gendered
power relations produce unequal technology uses and how technology uses in turn redefines
farmers’ subjectivity.
Questions of pragmatic utility and gender constraints are not unimportant, but neither
addresses the shaping of agricultural informatization or the implication of agricultural
informatization for different social groups. The changes in technology are reflected in the
alteration of groups to one another and are accomplished by groups where uses are configured
through adaptation and adjustment to labor incentives and demands (or political economy). First,
agriculture information is not a natural process of technological advancement. It is shaped by
specific political economies. How is agricultural informatization influenced by contested
imperatives of state intervention, market-centric logics, and public services? Second, agricultural
32
information as a development path is not neutral and it affects different social groups differently.
In addition, different social groups may deploy information technologies in different ways to
achieve their goals for development. A power perspective that takes into account relationships
among the state, management, and workers is thereby critical in revealing this state-led
agricultural restructuring scheme.
The next section proposes conceptual tools for my case studies. I use the first framework
to elaborate on the political economy of ICTs concerning rural labor, a subject I initiated earlier.
Secondly, I build two models of agrarian power dynamics designed to illuminate my specific
sites of rural development.
3. Conceptual Tools to Agrarian Power Relations in Two Cases
3.1 Rationale
The study conducts a structural, comparative analysis of representative cases that exhibit
two different modes of agricultural informatization. The cases represent two general modes of
informatization. The first is the top-down state and ag- tech company-led mode; the second, the
bottom-up peasant-led mode. The first case was constructed in a township in central Anhui
province, and the second was undertaken in a township in southern Anhui province. As my
fieldwork spanned across several regions, I find these two modes exist in other places as well.
The first stage of my fieldwork explored new agricultural practices related to information
technologies. This initial inquiry generated my categorization of the two modes.
For the purpose of conducting a comparative study, I chose the two sites which resemble
each other in cultural values, location, and provincial policies. They are both in Anhui province,
with similar climatic conditions and cultural values. The policies stipulated by the provincial
government frame both sites. They differ in terms of the composition of agricultural producers,
33
agricultural staples, and local policy focus. In the first case, the differentiation between small
farmers and agribusiness came to the front before an informatization project was designed and
implemented. The agricultural staples were grapes and strawberries, with grapes being a
signature product. In the second case, small farmers dominated the agricultural landscape. I
focused on the local poultry farming.
Therefore, the dissertation constructs overlapping but different conceptual tools to
approach agrarian power dynamics in these two cases. Before introducing the conceptual tools, I
review two major perspectives on power and explain how I combine them in understanding my
cases.
3.2 Power
Power is multifaceted and multidimensional (Lee, 1995). Two general orientations
characterize modes of explicating power relations. The first highlights dominance between two
social groups, although the bases of power are debated. The second accentuates the fluid and
pervasive nature of power.
Karl Marx and many of his followers probe power from a materialist perspective and
stress the class domination. They argue the ruling class which controls the means of production
exerts power to maintain their status over the working class. Max Weber (2009) defines power as
the ability of a social actor to achieve his or her goal and to influence others. He categorizes
power into economic power, political power, social power, and so forth. He agrees with Marx
that economic power is important, but he relativizes this importance via-a-vis other types of
power. Kurt Lewin (1944, 1951) asserts that power is the ability to induce forces on another
person over a span of potential activities. Based on Lewin’s construct, John French and Bertram
Raven (1959; Raven, 1965, 1983) have identified six bases or forms of power, including
34
informational power, coercive power, reward power, legitimate power, expert power, and
referent power. Informational power exists when an actor can give out clear and persuasive
information, which the recipient may accept and internalize. Coercive power comes from an
actor who will conduct surveillance over the other actor. Reward power refers to the power
stemming from a combination of surveillance and reward. Legitimate power corresponds with
Weber’s legitimacy construct. It exists when an actor is legitimately positioned to exert power.
Expert power comes from an actor who is assumed to be knowledgeable. Referent power stems
from “a sense of identification with the influencing agent” (p.3).
Richard Emerson’s (1962, 1964) power-dependence theory conceives power as a
relational phenomenon in which “(r)esources accrue power only when, and to the extent that, one
party to the relation must seek access to the other’s resources” (Ball-Rokeach, 1998, p.12). When
an individual needs the resources from another person or institution to satisfy needs or to attain
goals, this individual will form a dependency relationship with that person or institution. It can
be seen that the ownership of resources necessary for agricultural production is one of the key
factors in determining power relations among different social groups. In the meanwhile,
information and knowledge come also become the source of power.
The leading scholar backing up the second view of power is Michel Foucault. Although
he agrees that coercion comes with power, he accesses power from a more dynamic view. He
argued that, since the Enlightenment, the previous unified power hierarchy had been dissolved. It
is extremely difficult to claim who holds power and who is oppressed by power holders. A key
term that concerned Foucault was discourse. In his view, power creates and sustains discourses
that define what is the truth and what is knowledge (Foucault, 1995). As Fox (1998) explains,
35
For Foucault, the term 'discourse' referred both to the historically contingent sets
of practices (for instance, the practices which constitute clinical medicine) which
limit human actions and what may be thought, and to the theoretical concept
which accounts for the fact that humans actually do act and think in line with
these 'regimes of truth' (for instance, that people do - by and large - co-operate
with a clinical gaze which turns them into patients). (p. 417)
Unlike the Marxist and Weberian approaches, Foucault didn’t think there were any fixed sources
of dominating discourses. Different institutions and individuals are in a constant contention in
controlling discourses, and, in reality, no one can seize power (Foucault, 1988).
The influence of Marx on Foucault is ostensible, however. In particular, Marx’s
observation of how factories disciplined laborers informed Foucault’s invention of “technologies
of power” and his expansion of power from a class-based factory setting to all aspects of the
society (Lustig, 2014). As he wrote “the technological mutations of the apparatus of production,
the division of labour and the elaboration of the disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of
very close relations ... Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for
the other” (DP 218-221)” (cited by Lustig, p. 77). The Marxist origin that can be found in
Foucault’s work demonstrates the utility of both power perspectives in analyzing labor process
and production relations.
Discourse and power appear partners that underwrite inquiry into communication
practices. Studies that inherit Foucault’s approach explore how disciplinary discourses emerge
within alternative contexts where different institutions compete. Technologies of power lead to
the construction of subjectivities (e.g., Allen, 2008; Peci et al., 2009; Thorpe, 2008; Yan, 2003).
Occupying a central position in the contemporary society, media are considered an institution
36
that generates, circulates, and restricts discourses. Media construct and discipline social subjects
(e.g., Fortner, 2011; Thorpe, 2008).
This study combines the material and discursive approaches to power. As a critical
political economy project, it starts with the essential role of material bases or structures of power
and incorporates Foucault’s emphasis on disciplines brought into being and sustained by
discourses. I use material relations to interpret the power structures of state-propelled agriculture.
I also highlight the importance of discourses revolving around ICTs in alternating how the power
flow varies. This will be reflected in my conceptual tools developed at the end of the literature
review section.
3.3 Power and Rural China
According to Taijun Jin (2004), there are primarily two types of research of power and
rural China: the first focuses on the internal power structure in a village, i.e., the distributing of
power among different social groups in a village. The second type explores the relationship
between villages and the state. There is no close-knit integration of these two types of research.
In the first type, scholars identify different social groups, like elites within the establishment,
elites outside the establishment, and common villagers. In the second, scholars refine the
conventional state-society dichotomy. For example, Zhiyuan Cui (1998) proposes a three-layered
analytical framework, consisting of the upper level: the central state; the middle level: local
government and emerging capitalists; the lower level: common villagers.
Rural power studies come from different disciplinary perspectives: history, anthropology,
sociology, and more recently, political science. One trajectory situates agricultural as a pedestal
for village power analysis. Yet, most research in this area focuses on political power and the
political predominance of legitimacy. Jin (2004) argues, few studies attempt to keep up with the
37
changing power relations under new circumstances. This project, builds upon the previous
analysis of rural power structures, and re-centers agriculture as the focus of research.
Hansheng Wang (1994), examined the influence of rural industrialization on the
constitution of rural elites. My research attempts to build two models by teasing out the
consequences of the current digitalization of economy on elites and different social groups in
rural China. This power perspective differs from but also incorporates the dominant ICT4D
perspective. The ICT4D perspective focuses on whether and how ICTs fuel economic
development. My power perspective focuses on how ICTs restructure the power relations among
different social groups, and thus alter the constitution of how rural China appears. Landscapes
change; so, do labor practices.
Traditional sociological work on rural China tends to underestimate the role of new
information technologies in shaping a new rural China. In the meanwhile, continuities exist:
traditional social relationships are shaping how technologies are used and how technologies are
constructing a new rural China. Neither accounts for change. Communication technologies are a
lens to explore the agricultural structure in the transition era. The traditional and digital
landscapes of agricultural structure blend to bring together factions in the long-lasting debate on
the predominance of small peasants versus those of larger, corporate interests. Rural structures
do not remain totally intact, but are subject to change.
3.4 Framework for This Dissertation
The dissertation analyzes material and discursive traces of power in two locations. ,
Marxist interrogations on the material relations of power constitute the basis of the local power
structure; on the other hand, the discursive constructions of ICTs in the agriculture sector are
analyzed in state announcement, policy statements and other gathered material. I focus on the
38
structural and middle-level production and circulation of ICTs and, in some examples, attend to
interviews of those hailed into the disciplinary function of ICTs on individuals in laboring
practices.
In the first top-down case, the major stakeholders that I have identified include the local
government, the central and provincial governments, agricultural technology companies,
agribusiness, and smallholding farmers. Distinctive stakeholders conduct planning, production,
and post-production management with separately orientation but engaged in a common project. I
conceptualize the agrarian power dynamics from a more encompassing perspective. I highlight
the way in which the “digital” and the agricultural IoT company were rendered hegemonic
through official endorsement, media discourse, and farming practices. Local hegemony is the
configuration of a technology-social relationship as a single or necessary call and event. The
division of labor and distribution of economic rewards reflects a Marxist view of what
constitutes the bases of power structures in farming. The notion of digital (dis)connectedness is
critical to understanding power asymmetry in a world where objects, along with human beings,
are to be, or not to be, connected to the virtual world. The discursive construction of the IoT as
superior to human labor and of agricultural IoT companies as superior to “technological laggards”
reveals the more fluid power flow at the local level. Meanwhile, as power is not a fixed one-
dimensional relationship, I also discuss how “counter-hegemonic” forces confront the
mainstream rhetoric.
In the second bottom-up case, I observed the formation of a “networked agriculture”
where new forms of organizing farming emerged, generated by ground up efforts that
transformed technologically into enabled regimes of flexible accumulation. In this local space,
small farmers are connected with each in unprecedented ways and participate in the production
39
and reproduction of power relations through different avenues. Different stakeholders participate
in an integrated agricultural supply chain. To investigate the power dynamics, I have combined
Bernstein’s key questions concerning the social relations of production and reproduction and the
agricultural supply chain perspective. Meanwhile, I incorporate the discursive sphere created by
the local state and media as well. The following dimensions of power dynamics are highlighted
in networked agriculture: pre-production decision making; the division of labor in the production
stage; market access in post-production stage; uncertainty management ability; digital visibility;
and official endorsement, as shown in Figure 1.1. I argue that, the politics of agricultural
practices are revealed in these dimensions. The specifics of these conceptual tools will be
elaborated in corresponding chapters.
Figure
1.1 The conceptual tool for the second case
pre-production
decision making
the division of
labor in the
production stage
market access in
the post-
production stage
official endorsement
digital visibility
uncertainty management ability
40
4. Methods and Data
In the first stage of fieldwork for this project, I visited several sites where “agricultural
information” unfolded with different forms. The initial stage of my fieldwork explored new
agricultural practices related to information technologies. Initial studies, generated my
categorization of the two modes. The two modes are the top-down state and ag tech company-led
mode and the bottom-up peasant-led mode, echoing existing scholarship as well.
The first place that I toured was an office headquarter of a pig farm in Anhui. The
employees showed me the central monitor system in their meeting room. The Internet of Things
(IoT) technologies, composed of the sensors at the remote pig farm in a village, automatic
control systems, and the central monitor system in the meeting room, substantially facilitated
their management process and saved human labor. I was intrigued by why the IoT system could
have been adopted and how it was affecting the division of labor in the production stage. Similar
inquiries came across my mind when I was reading news articles that advocated IoT systems in
different agricultural sectors. However, another agricultural company that I visited in Jiangsu
province, that claimed to have applied the IoT system, taught me a lesson, too. Although the
official introduction of the company accentuated its claims to being technological advanced in
terms of the IoT, my visit revealed it was not using the system anymore because the technicians
in the company did not think the IoT system was suitable for the economically low-reward
vegetable planting. The contrast between the two companies, and the discrepancy between
discursive constructions of media and a real application of the IoT, cautioned me against being
overly optimistic about the state of the IoT development in agriculture.
This round of fieldwork on the IoT application persuaded me to select the relatively
higher economic sectors, and my first case of grape growing is such a sector. Also, here, the
41
agricultural technology company, agribusiness, and small farmers coexisted in the local grape
growing scene, which made possible the comparison and an exploration of the local power
dynamics.
The other mode that I found in the first round of fieldwork was, what I term, the small
farmer-dominated informatization mode. Through my own informal “surfing” experiences and
selective sampling narratives online, I found there to be an increasing number of more “small”
agricultural producers who sold their products on Taobao or WeChat. The products appeared to
be well received by urban consumers. Through different ways, I was able to contact a few of
them. My first visit was to a village in Hunan province, which was home to one of my contacts,
the owner of a farm. The trip from the capital city of his province to his hometown took about six
hours, half of which was spent on the way from the county town of his county to his hometown
village. This second half of the bus ride was in the mountainous area, along the meandering road.
His house was literally by a mountain, and it took him about 7 minutes to drive to the closet main
street in his village. It was there where I got to see all his chickens and observed how he
conducted production and transaction. He raised various animals, planted some special kinds of
vegetables, self-made smoked meat, and obtained honey from some honey farmers.
He asked the local telecommunications company to wire him to the Internet with the first
fiber line in his village. Besides selling products on WeChat, he also adventured on new ways of
interaction with his customers. On one of the days of my stay, his Mom cooked signature local
dishes for dinner, and he undertook livestreaming of our dinner gathering. Eating on a
livestreaming platform was the content of the video. The rich, inventive media literary he
exhibited left me an impression.
The subject’s village, in any sense, can be categorized as a remote village where small
42
farmers only got to farm on small plots of land. It is in that remote village that he mastered the
skills of social e-commerce and made his products known to many of his consumers across the
nation. His success credited him as a competent, young entrepreneur. The local government
recommended that he attend workshops on e-commerce and share his experiences with others. I
was intrigued by why and how the e-commerce rose to represent the informatization of the local
agriculture.
One of the contact places is a rural area located in southern Anhui province. I visited this
site with a similar set of inquiries and chose this site as my second case study. Here, I found
conditions comparable to my first case. As mentioned earlier, the places are both in Anhui
province, with similar climatic conditions and cultural values. The policies stipulated by the
provincial government frame both sites. They differ from one another in terms of the
composition of agricultural producers, agricultural staples, and local policy foci. In the first case,
the differentiation between small farmers and agribusiness came to the front before a designed
informatization project. The agricultural staples were grapes and strawberries, with grapes being
the signature products. In the second case, small farmers dominated the agricultural landscape. I
focused on poultry farmers.
The initial visits, contacts, and internet work shaped the ends of my inquiry. My first goal
of this project is to conduct a political economic analysis of different informatization modes, and
my second is to investigate the social impact of agricultural informatization on local agrarian
power dynamics. The study is not a comprehensive survey, of course; rather, I seek to examine
the local as these instances reveal, carry forward, and participate in a spectrum of power
dynamics where information, power, and forming are differently constructed.
For the first part, I looked at government documents from the state council, the Ministry
43
of Agriculture, and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to map out policies on this
mode. I uncovered whose interests are attended in the formation of these policies by archival
analysis. I asked why certain options are constructed, what else could have happened, and why
the project of agricultural informatization t appeared as it did in public representation. I
conducted textual analysis to explicate government documents and media reports.
Additionally, I conducted in-depth interviews with local bureaucrats, employees in
Internet companies and agricultural technology companies, local small farmers and agribusiness.
I approached the Agriculture Bureaus and interviewed the bureaucrats in charge of
informatization initiatives. Then, I interviewed the township-level agricultural bureaucrats who
directly contact with local agricultural producers. Subsequently, I interviewed a few employees
from Internet companies and agricultural technology companies who provide information
equipment and content services to local agricultural producers. After obtaining this knowledge, I
conducted interviews with local agricultural producers, small farmers and agribusiness, about
their perception and experience in an increasingly informatized circumstance.
In my top down case, I interviewed 5 local officials in the agricultural bureau and the
publicity department. I interviewed 8 employees in the agricultural technology company, 4 of
whom worked in the office and the other 4 people worked as laborers in the vineyard. I chose 3
agricultural company and did interviews with 9 staff members, including technicians, managers,
and sales personnel. I interviewed 21 households who grew grapes, vegetables, and strawberries.
For some of the households, I interviewed one person. For the other households, I interviewed
two or more people involved in vineyard management.
In the second bottom up case, I interviewed several extensive interviews with Ming, the
key person in a network of agriculture. I interviewed 6 people in this network, whom developed
44
business relationships with him. I interviewed 3 local officials. Meanwhile, I did 6 interviews
with small farmers who were not involved in this network but who lived in the same area where
Ming’s business spanned.
As mentioned above, in the first stage of my research, I visited several other sites to
explore how agricultural informatization was practiced. To sum up, I visited 4 agricultural
companies that claimed to have applied the IoT system in production and management. I
completed interviews with managers, technicians, and secretaries. I also interviewed laborers
who conducted farming. For the second mode, I visited another village in Hunan where I
observed the rise of a networked agriculture. In that village, I visited 6 households who were
involved in the network.
This inductive research method of using case studies has limitations. As I reveal in the
opening section of this chapter, I observed these two modes from my fieldwork. I believe there
are other modes of agricultural informatization given the multiplicity of agricultural practices
and of technologies. However, I think these two modes are indicative of how ICTs are
appropriated in the agriculture sector in rural China. The political economic forces that shape
these two modes can be found in similar locales. My comparative case analysis provides
theoretical scaffolds that can inform future studies on socio-technical communicative
infrastructures in both rural and urban communities.
The technique of inquiry has limits. It was not an easy task to interview local officials.
Therefore, in some parts of my analysis, I lack the perspective from local officials. I elaborate on
these limits in the final chapter and address future horizons of research.
45
Chapter 2: The Making of an Agricultural IoT Town
Introduction
This dissertation presents two modes of agricultural informatization. This chapter and
chapter 3 focus on the political economy of top-down socio-technical communication
infrastructures; the fourth and fifth chapters take up critical inquiry into the bottom-up, perhaps
lateral, political economies of socio-technical infrastructures. This chapter offers a political
economic analysis of my first case, the top down state ag-technology mode. I analyze the
construction of the Internet of Things (IoT) by the official and business rhetoric as represented to
be a superior solution in agricultural restructuring. Through situating the IoT in my specific
locale and drawing the global connections, I highlight the political economic forces making this
IoT project possible.
The first section describes Dawei town (hereafter, D town)
5
, its grape industry, and an
overview of what an agricultural IoT town means. The second section discusses the policies
stipulated by different levels of governments on agricultural informatization, and more
specifically, on the Internet of Things (IoT). The next section introduces Longcom, the
agricultural IoT company, and its role in the design of such an IoT town. This part also discusses
the booming agricultural IoT industry in China. The fourth section details how D town was
proposed as an Agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) town. The last section concludes this case
with reference to the literatures on global digital economy and explains how my case reflects the
global digital order. The next chapter documents the social consequences of this informatization
project.
5
Dawei town is located in the suburban area of Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, China
46
1. D town, Grapes, and the IoT town
1.1 The Signature “Grape Festival”
In late July of 2017, in the midst of heat waves, D town launched its 15
th
annual “Grape
Festival,” which drew extensive media coverage and official endorsement. Tourists flooded into
this scenic town to pick grapes and enjoy the hot but bracing fresh air in the green fields. The
countryside roads were congested by cars and pedestrians. The boisterous crowds would last into
October, when the curtain falls on the “Grape Festival.” From the tourists’ view, D town
welcomes visitors with a two-story reception center which fuses urban and rural styles. The
roads are decorated by tall and shadowy trees. Streets compose a neat grid. Grape farms are
located mainly along the roads, so there are few obstacles for tourists who seek their target
orchards.
Located at the southeast of Hefei city, the capital of Anhui province, D town is
considered Hefei’s agricultural backyard. However, 14 years ago, D town was not even close to
what it is nowadays. Before that, there were just a few grape farmers. Most of the locals grew
rice, the major staple of Southern China. In 1987, Mr. Li experimented on growing grapes on a
small plot of land, but a flood in the early 1990s gave him a shellacking. The plight forced him to
abandon grape growing and discouraged other grape growers as well.
6
In the years around 2000,
there were but a handful of farmers who opted to shift to grapes. They were encouraged by the
6
The Grape Cultural Tourist Festival in D town, Baohe district is coming in Hefei; People can have a
taste(Hefei Baohe qu Dawei putao wenhua lvyoujie jiangzhi; Shimin ke qianwang changxian 合肥包河区大圩葡萄
文化旅游节将至 市民可前往尝鲜). Accessed from http://news.hefei.cc/2014/0729/024382980_01.shtml.
47
local government, but many people were still reluctant to make this venturesome move at that
time.
7
In 2004, the local government released “The Decision on Accelerating the Development
of Urban Agriculture” (Jiakuai Fazhan Dushi Nongye de Jueding 加快发展都市农业的决定)
(Referred to as the Decision in the following text). The Decision featured the potential of D town
to adopt a different mode of agriculture that would center around urban consumer needs and be
more profitable than traditional agricultural staples. According to the Decision, the local
government would reward 500 RMB per mu
8
for grape growers in the first year, and 300 RMB
in the second.
9
The strong governmental incentive, as well as the considerable economic rewards from
grapes, resulted in an impressive sprouting of new grape farms – a 1000 mu increase per year
after 2005. Meanwhile, accompanying the crop shift, some local land was reconsolidated and
local agriculture producers were transformed into growers of economic crops. In total, there were
more than 1600 independent households and companies engaged in the grape business. Others
left for non-agricultural jobs outside the area. D town gradually shifted to grapes, strawberries,
lotus roots, and other kinds of more profitable crops, among which the grapes are considered the
signature staple of D town. Since its debut in 2003, the “Grape Festival” has arisen in popularity
and fame, turning into the signature brand of D town.
7
Interview with an independent farmer.
8
1 mu is 0.0666667 hectare.
9
The Grape Cultural Tourist Festival in D town, Baohe district is coming in Hefei; People can have a
taste(Hefei Baohe qu Dawei putao wenhua lvyoujie jiangzhi; Shimin ke qianwang changxian 合肥包河区大圩葡萄
文化旅游节将至 市民可前往尝鲜). Accessed from http://news.hefei.cc/2014/0729/024382980_01.shtml.
48
1.2 Grapes in China
The national grape yield in China has experienced a surge since the early 21
st
century, paralleling
the “grape rise” in D town. In 2002, the size of the total land for growing grapes was 5 million
mu, ranking sixth in the world, and the total yield was 4 million tons, ranking the fifth in the
world.
10
In 2014, the total area dedicated to grape production was 11. 508 million mu, ranking
the second in the world. The total crop yield was 12.546 million tons, ranking the first in the
world.
11
In 2015, the size and the total yield were 11. 985 mu and 13.669 tons respectively.
12
In
contrast with the teetering size of arable land in China, the expansion of grapes unveils the rising
demand for grapes and the strategic importance of grapes in China’s agriculture sector. This
echoes the historical trend Phillip Huang and Yusheng Peng (2007) described about agrarian
change in China – the grain-as-staple consumption mode transitioned to the grain-meat and fish-
vegetable and fruits consumption mode. Most of the grapes in China are for immediate
consumption, and the rest of them are to be made into dried grapes and grape wine. In D town,
the grapes are for immediate consumption as well. Few grapes are made into wines.
In China, the traditional grape regions are in the west and the north, particularly in
Xinjiang province, Hebei province, and Shanxi province. In these provinces, plenty of sunshine
10
The size of grape farms and the total yield of grapes in China (Zhongguo putao zhongzhi mianji ji putao
chanliang 中国葡萄种植面积及葡萄产量). Accessed from http://www.moeeom.com/mm92189851ee913.html.
11
The current state of grape production in China (Woguo putao shengchan xianzhuang 我国葡萄生产现
状). Accessed from https://wenku.baidu.com/view/d0a47bdb1711cc7930b71651.html.
12
Liu Fengzhi: “The Thirteenth Fifth Year” period is critical to the reform on the supply side of grapes in
China (Liu Fengzhi: “Shisanwu” shi zhongguo putao gongjice gaige de guanjian shiqi 刘凤之：“十三五”是中国葡
萄供给侧改革的关键时期). Accessed from http://www.sohu.com/a/167038965_182429.
49
and modest rainfall provide conditions where good-quality grapes are grown. In the past years,
grape farming grows in size, even though in these regions still, most of the grapes are for
immediate consumption. There has been no systematic research on why grapes have risen to
such dominance in China’s fruits structure. However, it makes sense to conclude provisionally
that urban consumption demands spurred suburban grape production, as well as the buildup of
suburban touristic grape farms.
In tune with this trend, the local government of Hefei city issued a command to
restructure the agricultural landscape of D town. The regular rice pattern gives way to a more
economic urban produce structure. The previous rice patties were changed into grape plantations
and fields for other types of economic crops. The decision has proved its foresight, with the
remarkable performance of local economy and the radiating fame of the “Grape Festival.”
1.3 D Town as the Internet of Things Town
In 2016, a special project was initiated together with the launching of the Grape Festival.
This special project was called the Agricultural Internet of Things Town (the Agricultural IoTs
Town). Anhui Provincial government chose D town as the experimental site of agricultural
Internet of Things (IoT). This project was cosigned by the local agricultural bureau and
Longcom, an agricultural technology company. Longcom company, headquartered in Anhui
province, made its first attempt of creating Shishan town (S town) as an agricultural IoT town in
Hainan province, an island province.
S town was designed with a special operating mode of “1+2+N,” including a service
platform (the 1), an operation center and a big data center (2), and N organizations and N units.
This mode of “1+2+N” connected farmers and established farmer-corporate relations. S town
built six IoT demonstration bases which grow dendrobium and Lychee and raise Yong sheep.
50
The technologies that equip these bases are water-fertilizer control systems, weather centers, and
crop-sensor systems.
13
Statistics show the average annual income of local farmers increased from
5428 RMB in 2014 to 8652 RMB in 2015, with a 59.4% increase, resulting from their increased
connectedness to the Internet.
As a pioneer in the field of the IoT for agriculture, S town became the site for the Annual
National Agricultural IoT Conference in 2006. The theme of the conference was “the IoT
Ecosystem, Smart Agriculture.” Officials, experts, and other participants admired S town as a
successful template. It was reported officials from other provinces were interested in replicating
the so-called IoT town.
With the glamour of S town’s success, Longcom started its second IoT town project in
Anhui province. D town was selected as the site for the second experiment of this concept,
followed by a few other towns in Anhui province. When asked about the main reason of
selecting D town as a demonstration site, Dong,
14
a manager at Longcom pointed to the strong
government support at the local level. According to him, the infrastructural cost of this IoT town
would be overly high for independent small producers. Even agricultural companies themselves
would encounter plaguing problems when applying Internet of Things. In the meanwhile, D town
had a geographical proximity to H city, where the consumers were capable of consuming
sustained and tourism-oriented agricultural produce.
The attempt to make D town an IoT town is part of the state’s and province’s ambition to
informatize the agriculture sector. As stated above, the agriculture sector is experiencing a
13
Guests of the National Agricultural IoTs Conference lauded Haikou Shishan Internet Town (Quanguo
nongye wulianwang dahui jiabin dianzan haikou shishan hulianwang xiaozhen 全国农业物联网大会嘉宾点赞海口
石山互联网小镇). Accessed from http://news.ifeng.com/a/20161211/50398913_0.shtml.
14
This is a pseudonym.
51
fundamental crisis due to environmental, economic, and social problems. From the state’s
perspective, agricultural informatization is a policy that further modernizes the agriculture sector.
Built on the decade-long policy emphasis on agricultural technological innovation in rural China,
the state includes informatization initiatives into the “Twelfth Five Year” and “Thirteenth Five
Year” plans. They have been prioritizing informatization in the yearly No.1 Documents since
2006. As the 2016 No.1 document states, modern information technologies, like the Internet of
Things, cloud computing, big data, and mobile Internet, are expected to drive the transformation
of the whole supply chain of agriculture.
The Thirteenth Five Year Bluebook released by Anhui provincial government highlighted
the role of informatization of the agriculture sector, and more broadly, of rural areas. The
communication infrastructure was to be created by informatizing planning, production,
transaction, and post-harvest stages. Local governments were expected to design policies that
would further integrate information technologies into existing configurations of agricultural
systems of communication. Alternatively, informatization was anticipated to generate new forms
of agricultural communication. The next section details how different levels of government
tackle agricultural information on the policy front.
2. Anhui and Agricultural Inforamtization
In 2011, Anhui province released a report “Plan on the development of rural and
agricultural informatization in the ‘Twelfth Five Year’ period in Anhui.” The local government
charted how agricultural informatization could be enhanced. The key concept was the merging of
three networks, agricultural cooperatives, and information service centers. The three networks
52
refer to telecommunications networks, broadcasting networks, and the Internet networks.
15
In
2017, the provincial government adjusted its leadership and followed up with a redefined goal
( “Plan on informatization development in the “Thirteenth Five Year” period in Anhui
province”). This proclamation commands the acceleration of rural and agricultural
informatization. The advanced measures included directives to develop e-commerce services,
build IoT demonstration sites, implement quality tracing systems, and conduct big data
analytics.
16
Thus, the “Thirteenth Five Year” plan provided more detailed measures intended to
accelerate informatization thereby integrating the communication infrastructures into a seamless
system of farming.
Under the guidance of these policies, Anhui Provincial Agricultural Informatization
unfolded. An Association was networked in Hefei in 2008 that connected Anhui Agricultural
University, Anhui Provincial Agriculture Commission, Anhui Academy of Agricultural Sciences,
Institute of Intelligent Machines, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Mobile Anhui Branch,
and China Telecom Anhui Branch. This network of state and private organizations was linked by
a commitment to propagating national policy, organizing experts for promoting agricultural
15
Plan on the development of rural and agricultural informatization in the ‘Twelfth Five Year’ period in
Anhui (Anhuisheng “shierwu” nongye nongcun xinxihua fazhan guihua 安徽省“十二五”农业农村信息化发展规
划). Accessed from
http://www.aheic.gov.cn/zwgk/zwgk_view.jsp?strId=13770790549227146&view_type=4?kbjjqxbmpcvxlnyn?coaaa
akbcvocezfr?lwjsbcoaklufbjjz.
16
The notice from Anhui Provincial Government on distributing the “Plan on informatization development
in the ‘Thirteenth Five Year’ period in Anhui province” (Anhuisheng renmin zhengfu guanyu yinfa anhuisheng
“shisanwu” xinxihua fazhan guihua de tongzhi 安徽省人民政府关于印发安徽省“十三五”信息化发展规划的通
知). Accessed from http://www.ahedu.gov.cn/163/view/20437.shtml.
53
informatization technologies, and developing agricultural informatization products.
17
The
partnerships among independent groups both depended upon and were busy building
communication infrastructures for the region.
The municipal level in 2013 was active, too. The Hefei government invested a
considerable amount of money into rural television and telephone systems as well as information
sharing platforms. At that time, the focus of agricultural informatization was infrastructural
buildup aimed to enhance information gathering, storage, and sharing. Reportedly, the level of
agricultural informatizaition in Hefei was ahead of other regions and cities.
18
Baohe district, where D town is located, integrated academic and corporate forces to push
its own IoT project forward, “smart made in Baohe.” The district expanded efforts to advance
manufacturing industries. These systems were adapted to what became an adjacent area,
agricultural informatization technologies.
19
As part of Baohe district’s effort to transform the traditional agricultural mode, D town
was branded as the IoT town with the technological support from Longcom. In 2016, D town
17
The second assembly of Anhui Provincial Agricultural Informatization Association was convened in
Hefei (Anhuisheng nongye xinxihua xiehui dierci huiyuan daibiao dahui zaifei zhaokai 安徽省农业信息化协会第
二次会员代表大会在肥召开). Accessed from http://www.ahny.gov.cn/detail.asp?id=BA4CCCF1-8711-492F-
9EFA-ED7747EDC8F7
18
Hefei’s experience of agricultural informatization will be promoted nationwide (Hefei nongye xinxihua
jingyan jiang quanguo tuiguang 合肥农业信息化经验将全国推广). Accessed from
https://wenku.baidu.com/view/f6a5347058fafab069dc02dc.html.
19
Baohe district congregates “smartness” to help corporation in innovation (Baohequ ju “zhi” zhuqiye
chuangxin 包河区聚“ 智”助企业创新). Accessed from http://ah.people.com.cn/n/2014/0715/c358364-
21673432.html.
54
was introduced to the public as an experimental site by the local government. The experiment
was represented by a defining equation. As the “1+2+N” mode proved its validity in S town,
Longcom replicated it in D town. Specifically, the “1” platform is the integrated service platform,
composed by the official website, a WeChat account, and a mobile phone application. The “2”
centers include an operation control system and a big data center. The operation control center is
designed to monitor and analyze tourists’ footprints, visiting time, browsing track, and
surroundings. The big data center can analyze financial data, tourism data, transportation data,
agricultural data, and e-commerce data for decision-making purposes.
20
The 1 + 2 part of the formula references the apparatus of data gathering and usage. The
letter “N” references normative guidance or the wisdoms imagined to flow from the uses of
information. “N” is thus deployed to reference “smart attraction,” “smart transportation,” “smart
agriculture” “smart e-commerce,” and “smart recreation.” By “smart agriculture,” Longcom
means to modernize agricultural production and management systems in pre-production,
production, and post-production stages. Longcom plans use of “smart” platforms to provide
agricultural inputs; use the IoT to manage production, food processing, and storage; apply e-
commerce for agricultural transactions; and develop quality tracing systems.
21
Thus, the formula
couples data gathering and use apparatus to farming activities that are imagined in a system that
transforms biotic entities from their organic roots into caloric distribution. The material
communication infrastructure becomes integrated and rendered efficient through informatized
networks.
20
From materials obtained from Longcom
21
From materials obtained from Longcom
55
The network extended the commercial value of agriculture through attracting tourist
dollars and creating easily accessible means of obtaining goods. “Smart recreation” is part of the
system. The 19
th
century created a feature of public life for visitors to enjoy traveling and
viewing nature called “rational amusement.” Longcom directed efforts toward building a
demonstration tourist agricultural site in Hefei, develop an outdoor multimedia video center, and
establish a Ping Pong team. Development was to be further advanced by “Smart e-commerce.”
An aspect of the system that refers to city-wide sales services for food and other products with
quality tracing functions and off-line delivery systems.
Longcom coupled “smart agriculture,” to “smart recreation” and “smart e-commerce” in
an effort to install a network that would boost the economic well-being of the region. Its next
step was to refine these three smart systems and develop two additional nodes to the system.
As a leading force in the area of the agricultural IoT, Longcom achieved impressive
successes. Its successes were achieved during a relatively short period compared to other
technology companies that built upon long decades of foundation. In the next section, I briefly
document the history of Longcom to explain the context for successful transformation and
integration of communication infrastructures.
3. Longcom, the Internet of Things, and the Internet of Things in Agriculture
3.1 Longcom: The Internet of Things Company
Xu, the CEO of Longcom, established this high-tech agricultural company. Agriculture
had not been his central concern. Before stepping into the sector, he owned a business in foreign
trade. His shift to establishing and stewarding a company specializing in a totally different field
was partly explained by his intention to respond and contribute to the state’s directives on
56
agricultural informatization. The potential, enviable economic rewards, compared to the
somewhat overcompetitive industrial sector, pulled him to a sector transition in business.
Longcom group claims to be a high-tech company covering smart agricultural
infrastructural designs, bio information applications, and big data operations. Longcom claims to
solve “grain and food safety” issues, fundamental in China’s agricultural sector. Since its
establishment, the company has spun off a few subsidiary groups in different areas. The Hefei
Longcom IoT company remains its headquarter. The company cooperates with local
governments and its research institutes equip agribusiness with the IoT systems and develop
experimental agricultural sites.
Longcom developed monitoring systems of field crops. The matrix of sensors, data
gathering, software and computing were designed to assess the state of crops, detect potential
diseases, and ripeness for harvest. This materializes the concept of “precise agriculture.” The
process can be adjusted for use across different crops, including paddy rice, wheat, and corn.
22
The success of the IoT Town in Hainan province stimulated the proposal of this IoT town
in Anhui province. It is for sure that Longcom derived and implemented the concept of “IoT” in
its system of infrastructure. What does the “IoT” mean for the people who work in the sector?
What does it stand for as a means of directing social practices into a novel, designed, and
untraditionally interconnected space for labor activities? I will tap into the social makeup of the
IoT concept in the next section.
22
Anhui Province Wheat Monitoring System (Anhui sheng xiaomai siqing jiance xitong 安徽省小麦四情
监测系统). Accessed from http://www.lkwlw.com/chenggonganli/shengbujixiangmuanli/2015-03-05/615.html
57
3.2 The Internet of Things
The notion of the IoT remains attractive to local state administrators and the community
because it embodies the imaginaries of an evolved Internet. The Internet has connected
individuals in the virtual world, and the IoT is envisioned as straddling the boundary between the
virtual world and the real world by connecting objects or people to the digitally formed
information network.
In as early as 2002, Chana Schoenberger and Bruce Upbin depicted how retailers and
manufacturers use microchips and wireless sensors for various purposes: count vouchers, track
the movement of items, track consumer purchases. The idea was to automate data collection and
generate more advanced data analytics with the end of modeling projective results. These
scholars also warned that potential ethical and legal problems would soon emerge from this data-
heavy scene.
Ushering into the 2010s, with technological advancement and increasing
commercialization of technologies, the term of the “Internet of Things” has become more
popular. Probably the most recognizable IoT application appears in the so called “smart homes.”
The once movie-like scene of voice-controlling lights is made possible by smart light lamps and
voice assistants. Google Home, Amazon Echo, and other smart assistants strive to connect home
electronic devices to its networks. The industrial usage of the IoT escaladed as well, reflected in
health care, telecommunications, and other fields (Islam et al., 2015; Risteska Stojkoska and
Trivodaliev, 2017; Wortmann and Flüchter, 2015).
This term has been imagined in multiple ways. Perhaps there is no core idea or quality
capable of defining the term. Samuel Greengard (2015) puts together a definition by organizing
conceptual ingredients:
58
the Internet of Things quite literally means ‘things’ or ‘objects’ that connect to the
Internet—and each other. This could be almost anything—a computer, tablet or
smartphone, fitness device, lightbulb, door lock, book, airplane engine, shoes or football
helmet, to name a few. Each of these devices or things has a unique identification number
(UID) and an Internet Protocol (IP) address. (p. 15)
Greengard (2015) finds important the distinction between the Internet of Things and the Internet
of Everything. The former describes the network that connects physical objects, while the latter
refers to the Internet that consists of digital items which are inherently designed to generate,
exchange, and communicate data.
A major tool that connects physical objects to digital networks is radio frequency
identification (RFID), and “(t)he technology relies on microchips that pull data from sensors
built into the machines or chips that reside on or in a device” (Greengard, 2015, p. 17). Using
this technology, nearby readers can collect information and data from RFID chips and these
chips can automatically exchange information with computers (Greengard, 2015). Other
important tools that are used as part of the IoT are “embedded wireless sensors and actuator
devices” (Pérez and Barbolla, 2014, p. 19).
The IoT figures the original imagination of how the real world is connected to the virtual
world. The IoT is not simply the extension of the existing Internet. It is renovating the current
networking technologies, enabling the functioning of various, and previously disconnected,
“things” (daCosta, 2014). Built upon the convergence of increasingly affordable sensors, cloud
computing techniques, and other innovations, the IoT systems expand exponentially (Kshetri,
2017). Predictions of the state of the IoT in the near future outline a world where the number of
59
connected devices dwarves that of human beings who are connected to the Internet (Pticek,
Podobnik, and Jezic, 2016).
The possibilities and pitfalls associated with the broad meaning of the IoT have been the
subject of public discussion. For example, the legal challenges that the IoT present for users have
not been well articulated in existing legislation, resulting in the ambivalence responsibility
tracing system for these new technologies. According to Eric Barbry (2012), the virtual world
and the real world have distinct “key concepts,” which unavoidably lead to the clash of the two
worlds. Eric Barbry (2012) states:
Today, from a legal perspective, these two worlds [virtual and real] are hermetically
sealed off from each other. The physical world is built on longstanding rules with key
concepts such as ‘ownership’ and ‘fault.’ The digital world has changed those concepts.
Admittedly, they still exist in the digital world, but they have been revamped: ownership
has been replaced in particular by the ‘right to share’ and ‘fault’ has made way for other
systems such as ‘notification. (p. 87)
Among the new challenges, one of the core problems is that, “things do not have a legal status.
Legally, they are nothing; they do not exist” (Barbry, 2012, p. 88). It is challenging identifying
the object, connect the object, and let the object take charge. The IoT complicates legal,
economic, and social systems because it embeds agency to things like software programs that
take charge of decisions by processing automated gathering, assembling, and directing
information.
It becomes a difficult issue to deal with the information generated by these networks.
When these pieces of information become active, and when the things are offering analyses and
60
solutions, existing social, market, legal, and state rules are vague, only analogically related, to
defining responsibilities and liabilities of the system put into play.
Privacy issues, for example, constitute a haunting problem for users. It seems that, with
the IoT, personal information can hardly be kept private. For example, when you use a smart
scale, your weight information is automatically uploaded to the network, and this piece of
information is attached to you. You can hardly keep it private. From a political economic
perspective, the ownership of information thus plays a critical role and it matters as who can
control and use the data collected through these networks.
The IoT has been increasingly used in the Global South, and particularly in China.
China’s ZTE company has the most IoT-related patents in the world, and China is leading the
research and development of the IoT (Kshetri, 2017). The fledgling IoT-related sector is
predicted to further booming, being applied across different economic sectors, including
agriculture.
The IoT is predicted to have gigantic economic potential. McKinsey Global Institute
released a study, predicting that the IoT “will in the year 2025 create between nearly $4 trillion
to $11 trillion in economic benefits globally” (New York Times, 2015).
23
As with this rampant
expansion of the IoT, the Agricultural companies deriving from the concept of the IoT are
booming.
Thus, agriculture becomes a hot area for capital investment. AgFunder, a leading
marketplace bridging AgriFood tech startups and investments capital, reported that, in the first
23
Hardy, Quentin. The Internet of Things Has Vast Economic Potential, McKinsey Report Says. New York
Times, June 24, 2015. Accessed from
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/the-internet-of-things-has-vast-economic-potential-report-says/
61
half of 2015, agtech companies captured $2.06 billions of capital, almost equivalent to the total
amount of investments in 2014.
24
In the first half of 2017, the number reached $4.4 billion.
25
Among these ag tech companies, those specializing in the IoT, big data, and precision
agriculture technologies claim a prominent position. In the English world, the term “agricultural
IoT” is used less often than that in the Chinese literature and reports. For example, some English
sources use “precision agriculture” to describe a type of management mode enabled by use of
satellite imaging, sensor data collection, and big data analysis (e.g., Anurag, Roy, and
Bandyopadhyay, 200; Haboudane and Miller, 2002). These technologies, actually, can be loosely
attached to the term “IoT.”
The term “IoT” sounds technical, and this may be the reason policy makers in the United
States avoid it. Yet, in the Chinese world, the “IoT” frequently makes headlines. It often appears
beside a sister term “e-commerce.” Different levels of governments, not an exception, have
flared the concept of “IoT” around in making agricultural policies. It is interesting that this
technical term has gained widespread recognition. IoT has become the umbrella label for how to
upgrade agriculture in the Chinese context. The IoT attracts market investment and generates
news headlines. Where there is market and public action, questions of policy are always nearby.
The IoT raises questions of governance which are especially complicated since the impacts of
self-directing objects on questions of market, society, and legal accountability are constructed
around human agency.
24
Louisa Burwood-Taylor. Moving to Mainstream: AgTech Gathers $2.06bn in the First Half of 2015. July
31, 2015. Accessed from
https://agfundernews.com/moving-to-mainstream-agtech-gathers-2-06bn-in-the-first-half-of-2015.html
25
Louisa Burwood-Taylor. AgriFood Tech Startups Raise $4.4bn in H1-2017 as Global VC Market Signals
End of Downturn. September 20, 2017. Accessed from https://agfundernews.com/category/agtech-funding/
62
3.3 Agricultural IoT in Policy
In 2012, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued “The ‘Twelfth Five
Year’ Plan for the development of the Internet of Things.” This directive marked the first year of
the development of the IoT in China.
26
The document outlined the state’s support in many
economic sectors, including the agriculture sector. In the 2016 National Agricultural IoT
conference in Hainan was co-organized by the Ministry of Agriculture and the People’s
government of Hainan. Qu Dongyu, the vice president of the Agricultural Ministry delivered a
keynote speech. He pointed out that everyone needed to accord agricultural IoT attention. He
identified the process as critical to developing the most fundamental new technology as the
informatization of agriculture. He added that China needed to take advantage of the information
revolution. Data systems attached to organic processes of cultivation would create a shortcut in
the paths to agricultural modernization. Smart agriculture was placed on the national agenda.
27
From the state’s perspective, the importance of agricultural IoT was obvious.
In Anhui province, agricultural IoT became articulated in the announcement of the
“Thirteenth Five-year plan.” Anhui itself was selected as one of the demonstration provinces for
the “IoT” in 2012.
28
The agricultural bureau of Anhui province frequently publishes reports on
the advanced applications of the IoT across for the province. It is worth further contemplating
that all the entities mentioned in these reports are agribusiness, agricultural companies. For
26
“The ‘Twelfth Five Year Plan’ for the development of Internet of Things” was released. (“Wulianwang
‘shierwu’ fazhan guihua” fabu 《物联网“十二五”发展规划》发布). Accessed from
http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2012-02/14/content_2065999.htm
27
The “Internet+Agriculture” Shishan mode is liked (“hulianwang + nongye” shishan moshi huo dianzan
“ 互 联 网+ 农业”石山模式 获 点 赞). Accessed from http://www.ahhswlw.com/news/info/2016-12-12/522.html.
28
http://ah.anhuinews.com/system/2014/02/27/006328958.shtml.
63
example, a piece of news in 2014 reports that 111 agricultural companies in Anhui province were
“connected” to the IoT. It shows more advanced information technologies, following
telecommunications infrastructural buildups, have secured policy attention. The “IoT,”
representing the newest generation of advanced information technologies, constitutes a policy
focus.
Policy fever is the major driving factor of the IoT- speculative realism (once called hype)
in the agriculture sector in China. Taking Anhui Province as an example. Hype works its magic
through hyperbolic advertising and aggressive public relations. Speculative realism is a style of
thinking, expressed as a bundle of advanced thinking policy doctrines and announcements that
assert strategically ontological claims of things coming into being—the future. Speculative
realism spreads contagiously as wide-spread beliefs that animate changes determined to be on
the way. Speculative realism works rhetorically in a manner to self-fulfilling prophecy (Harman,
2012; Merton 1948; Niemoczynski, 2013). As mentioned above, a piece of news in 2014 reports
that 111 agricultural companies in Anhui province were “connected” to the IoTs. Most of the
projects were initiated by local governments as experimental sites. For example, in Hanshan
county, Anhui province, the total investment in IoT projects was 1.83 million yuan in 2015. Of
this 1.83 million yuan, 1.5 million was funded by the municipal government and China
Agricultural University, and local agricultural companies were responsible for the 0.33 million
yuan.
29
A report released by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of
29
Hanshan County IoT programs push forward agricultural modernization. (Hanshan xian wulianwang
xiangmu jianshe tuijin nongye xiandaihua 含山 县 物 联 网 项 目建 设 推 进农业现 代化). Accessed from
http://www.masnw.gov.cn/plus/view.php?aid=19604.
64
Finance, and the Ministry of Agriculture expressed their determination in investing in high-
standard agricultural infrastructure, including big data and other informatization buildups.
30
Besides strong governmental support, agricultural high tech companies play an important
role. Agricultural high tech companies are prospering in China.
3.4 Speculative Realism and the Rise of Agtech Companies
Speculative realism links, aggregates and argues computer science, philosophy and
advertising into a conceptual mix. The networking of sensors, data gathering, programming and
processing are imagined to connect previously distinct pieces of activities, that become
integrated by an imagined supply chain. The supply chain itself is more than a means of logistics.
Rather, such integrations bring into being new ways of “doing things” where objects (like
software programs and computing) joining what is formerly distinct, integrate as a system. Since
the beginning of the 2010s, agtech companies have grown and new ones have begun to emerge
rapidly. Besides Longcom, many other agricultural companies have jumped on the IoT
bandwagon. For example, Zhejiang Hongsui Valley IoT company was established in 2013. The
organization, aimed to develop a comprehensive agricultural IoT and cloud computing platform.
It served 1530 consumers, including modern agricultural farms, fish companies, tea companies,
and vegetable companies.
31
Another representative example is China Agricultural Chexi
Company, a pioneering player in this field, which was adapted from Beijing Engineering Sensor
Research Center. It was established in 2012 and spun off two branches in Tianjin and Shandong.
30
Three ministries released a report which indicates the enlargement of investment in agricultural IoT
construction. (Sanbuwei fawen jiang kuoda dui nongye wulianwang jianshe touzi). 三部委 发 文将 扩 大 对农业 物 联
网建 设 投 资 August 24, 2017. Accessed from http://www.sohu.com/a/167031544_299995.
31
The official website of Hongsui Valley. Accessed from
http://www.tophons.com/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=lists&catid=3
65
Along with its cooperative relationship with universities and research centers, it also signed a
contract with Norway AKVA group as its agent in the Great China region.
32
Longcom has its
transnational connections as well. It appears the transnational green connections in the
agriculture sector set the background of the glittering rise of agtech companies in China.
3.5 The Transnational Green Connection
Information technologies adopted in the agriculture sector are transnational. The sensors
that constitute the material foundations of the precision farming in the agricultural economy of
the United States were largely manufactured in developing countries. Many databases on crop
growth, management, and transaction information serve not only the domestic market, but also
the international market.
There are only a few countries where the so-called smart agriculture is initiated and
subsequently well developed. Besides the well-known American agricultural story, Israel is also
leading in terms of innovating agricultural information technologies. Its leading role lies not only
in the state’s collective effort in integrating and upgrading agricultural production, but also in the
number of startups specializing in revamping the way in which crops are grown, managed, and
transacted. The current number of innovated agricultural startups is over 400, and half of them
were established in quite recent years.
33
These companies focus on biological alteration of seeds
and water-saving technologies as well as repurposing agriculture-related technologies, such as
data-based decision making techniques, machine-based plantation, and producer-retailer e-
32
The official website of China Agricultural Chexi Company. Accessed from http://www.zncxi.com/
33
More than 400 startups are continuing the “agricultural miracle” in Israel. (400 duojia chuangye gongsi zhengzai
yanxu yiselie “nongyeqiji” 400 多家创业公司正在延续以色列“农业奇迹”). Accessed from
http://news.wugu.com.cn/article/1083495.html.
66
commerce links.
34
In countries faced with imperative resource constraints, like Irsrael, the
advance of agricultural technologies are urgent. Efficiencies through information acquisition,
data pools, and analytic projections are of great importance. IoT spreads in relations among
countries facing somewhat similar needs or useful opportunities. Longcom has built cooperative
relations with such an Israeli company.
The umbrella term of the “Internet of Things” does not have an essential conceptual
definition; rather, the term references mainly assemblies of technologies: crop growth
management systems, data collection systems, data analysis systems, and data management
systems. The data collection system is usually composed by sensors that can collect relevant
information on crop growth. The crop management system is primarily designed to automatically
water, fertilize, and manage crop growth or assist in these aspects. The IoT, to put it in a different
way, are connecting the crops, though at different levels, and some crops are not even connected.
For Longcom, the system to manage grape growth in D town was well built. One of the
representative systems is the water-fertilizer-integration system, which can water and fertilize the
grapes in a less labor intensive, variable manner by substitution of more automatic, dependable
attention to individual vines. A traditional way of watering grapes is regular irrigation, just as
watering regular plants. A relatively sophisticated adjustment, drip irrigation, is to modify
material infrastructures so that the system works with measured precisions. This process requires
farmers to install a holed pipeline on the earth surface underneath grape vines and this can save
water. In this way, the fertilizer can be blended into water. Yet, the water-fertilizer-integrated
system can blend water and fertilizer and can be automatically distributed to the pipelines for
drip irrigation. The technique and apparatus were imported from an Israel company which
34
ibid.
67
concentrates on the development of automatic systems. Longcom not only applied this system in
its own vineyard but also promoted its usage in other grape orchards as well as in other types of
plantations in other regions.
In addition to importing existing IoTs technologies, Longcom has been cooperating with
an Israel company-BF IoTs agricultural company, to develop and manufacture crop sensors in
Taizhou, Jiangsu province. This form of transnational collaboration has emerged, representing
how different countries and regions are co-joining the bandwagon of IoT for agriculture. It is
apparent that the green links among different countries and regions are growing.
35
Grapes are but one crop. The variety of interventions appear limitless, nearly. So
agricultural IoT companies continue to burgeon in China. As such, policy emphasis grows as do
questions of capital investment, economic rewards, and unanticipated risks, costs, and blowback
from the intensive spread of novel change.
3.6 The IoT Self-Fulfiling Prophecy and the Agriculture Sector
As described in the previous subsections, state initiatives and ag-tech companies have
created this IoT- realism in the agriculture sector in China. What philosophers call speculative
realism is understood by public relations practitioners as hype. Hype is an example of a self-
fulfilling prophecy. As Robert Merton defines, “The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning,
a false definition of the situation, evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false
conception come true” (p. 506). To put it more broadly, the self-fulfilling prophecy is a
“speculative” definition of the situation, on which new behaviors form to achieve this
35
Smart irrigation and water-fertilizer-integrated solutions (Zhineng guangai yu shuifei yitihua jiejue
fangan 智能灌溉与水肥一体化解决方案).
Accessed from http://www.lkwlw.com/jiejuefangan/dianzishangwu/2017-07-27/696.html.
68
“speculative” outcome. The articulation of a future horizon creates an urgency for change as a
means to get to the better horizon (or avoid disaster) and so a practice and its technologies takes
on an aura of inevitability. Merton (1948) spotted the self-fulfilling prophecy as a typical
rhetorical appeal that crosses traditional and modern society. The IoT is a creature of post-
modernity, hence the blending of philosophy and advertising into the announced inevitability of
data systems where things are accorded the status of agents.
In the human history, there are many technologies branded with high expectations in the
early stage of their formations. Gartner, speaking within the context of public relations. Gartner
represents a leading research and advisory company. He extrapolates a graphic interpretation of
the life cycle of technologies as a matter of hype or the overbuilding of expectations. This hype
cycle theory periodizes the life course of technologies into five stages, the second of which
represents the peak stage of technologies.
36
In this stage, the specific technology is credited with
unrealistic expectations. In particularly, the media and policy makers would describe this specific
technology as a panacea to problems in the economy and society. After this stage, the public and
media lower their expectations and experience disenchantment. Finally, they adjust their
expectations and opt for a more realistic and mainstream understanding and application of the
technology.
Although this hype cycle has been questioned, it is true this theory structures imaginary
spaces into the differential reception of technologies in the public and depicts how media play a
role in inflating and deflating technologies. It is still hard to tell whether the IoT in agriculture in
China is replicating this hype cycle or whether the IoT is merely in a transitory peak stage.
36
Gartner Hype Cycle. Accessed from http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-
cycle.jsp.
69
However, it is for sure that state policies and media both portray the IoT as critical in upgrading
the agriculture sector in China. Speculative realism may be a better interpretative frame to think
about what is coming to being, in the wake of understandings of technology that create spaces of
expanded automaticity. In the wake of such expansion, social turbulence ensues with questions
of governance needing settlement.
Besides high expectations set by media and the state, one major characteristic of this IoT
realism is a number of companies have been burgeoning, revolving around the concept of the IoT.
I searched through the website of China Agricultural Internet of Things, which labeled itself as
the largest IoT information platform, and found 39 agricultural IoT companies that registered on
this website. The following figure shows the years in which these companies were established.
Figure 2.1 Number of Agricultural IoT Companies by Year
IoT applied to farming is a relatively recent phenomenon. Since 2006, 39 companies
developed, most in the last a few years. Growth corresponds to the recent state policy
endorsements. A survey of the business descriptions and agendas of the top 15 companies finds
the following themes.
First, many companies seek to apply the IoT to greenhouses. Most are working on
designing systems for managing greenhouses, including a system composed of several kinds of
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
number
70
sensors, a central control system, and mobile accesses to this central system. These sensors can
monitor the temperature, moisture level, and other aspects of greenhouse growth conditions. The
central system can provide a comprehensive view of how greenhouses operate, send alerts if any
conditions deviate from the standard range, and sometimes even adjust automatically the
environment. As mobile phones are widely and conveniently available, developing mobile
terminals also becomes part of the business plans.
Second, some companies work strategically on a key area of crop production, such as
rendering the irrigation system more productive and less labor dependent. These organizations
attempt to develop an automatic irrigation system that can water the crops in need. Automation
saves water, reduces labor costs, and protects the environment. As mentioned above, one of the
priorities of Longcom is to improve and popularize the irrigation system imported from an Israeli
company.
Third, some companies seek to create large scale, outdoor field monitor apparatus (Datian
大田). Longcom, China Agriculture Chenxi, and a few others have developed online big field
platforms to extract real-time information from specific sections of a broad area. These
complicated platforms are often the result of collaboration with and support from government.
For example, Zhejiang Tuopu IoT company worked with the local governments in several
provinces in establishing demonstration sites with the “big fields” monitoring and alerting
system.
37
Fourth, many companies are committed to a quality tracing system. Food safety issues
attract negative publicity. So, companies develop means to document the whole production
process of agricultural harvesting, processing and distribution. Each product is tagged with a
37
Accessed from its official website http://www.tpwlw.com/case/list_8_1.html.
71
unique QR code. Through scanning these QR codes, consumers can know where these products
originate, the chemicals used on them, and producers’ information.
The above major business areas that these agricultural IoT companies cover can also
partly explain the IoT development of communicative infrastructures. Communication works as
an integrative nexus bringing together real time data gathering into adjustments in the operations
of the machineries of production. Thus are electronic, mechanical, organic, and human resources
connected. These solutions are attempts to fix long-term problems existing in the agriculture
sector and to maximize efficiency, profitability, and sustainability all simultaneously. In this
respect, the IoT is speculated into being a panacea for upgrading agriculture.
IoT expectations in the agriculture sector in China and agricultural IoT companies are
burgeoning in China. The expectations are set into institutional structures through
announcements of policy imperatives and the impulse of capital investments seeking economic
rewards. In the next section, I give a more detailed analysis of how the agricultural IoT town was
proposed and implemented in D town.
4. The Proposal of Establishing an Agricultural IoT town
4.1 D Town as the Chosen Site
With the glamour of S town’s success, Longcom started its second IoT town project in
Anhui province. D town was selected as the second experimental site for this concept, followed
by a few other towns in Anhui province. The proposal of branding D town as an agricultural IoT
town is mainly a top-down decision.
When asked about the main reason of selecting D town as the demonstration site, Wei
38
pointed to the strong government support at the local level. The local government wants to
38
A manager at Longcom
72
upgrade the local agriculture sector, using a more scientifically efficient way to grow grapes and
other produce. In the meanwhile, it is not only about the agriculture sector. It is actually this
whole idea of an IoT town where tourism and daily life is supposed to be equipped with IoT.
And, the IoT here includes more than sensing technologies or monitoring technologies. As
introduced in previous sections, it includes many components, including smart farming, e-
commerce, smart recreation, and so forth.
The local government saw great potential of Longcom’s IoT model, and therefore
supported the establishment of the IoT D town. They provided help on many fronts. First, at the
policy level, the local government legitimizes the status of an IoT town and escalates the
establishment of an IoT town to a priority on the government agenda. On the launching day of
the IoT town in 2016, the leader of Anhui provincial agricultural bureau, the leader of Hefei
Municipal agricultural bureau, district party secretary, and other high-level officials were present.
The leader of Hefei Municipal agricultural bureau and district party secretary made theme
addresses. They highly appraised the pioneering exploration of establishing an IoT town and saw
that as a promising way to make D town more prosperous and more famous among consumers.
This can be a way to further upgrading the grape industry.
39
Second, with policy support, the government also brought extensive media attention to
the IoT town. The news that there established a new cutting edge IoT town appeared on many
mainstream media platforms. Similarly, Longcom received extensive media attention and
39 The opening ceremony for the launching of Anhui province and Hefei city Agricultural IoT town and
the fourteenth “Green Dawei” Grape Culture and Tourism Festival (Anhui sheng ji hefeishi nongye wulianwang
xiaozhen chuangjian huodong ji dishisijie “lvse dawe” putao wenhua lvyoujie kaimu yishi juxing 安徽省暨合肥市
农业物联网小镇创建活动暨第十四届“绿色大圩”葡萄文化旅游节开幕仪式举行. Accessed from
http://www.baohe.gov.cn/DocHtml/1/16/08/00094936.html.
73
coverage, and Longcom has always been appraised as a bellwether in this agricultural technology
arena. The grape industry in D town was a focus of media reports before the establishment of the
IoT town, and after that, the grape festival got more media coverage due to its innovative nature
and technological components. These celebratory public activities appear related to media and
governments’ pursuit of and firm belief in technologies. In the history of China, the pursuit of
technological development has a long history. It is generally believed or hoped technologies can
solve problems China faces, starting in the Self-Strengthening Movement in the 19
th
century and
continuing to the Internet pursuits of the 2010s.
In addition to publicity accorded by media coverage, Longcom established its own media
center in D town, as part of the IoT town project. In this media center, grape consumers can
interact with hosts in Anhui TV Channel. The operation is branded as a livestreaming media
center.
Third, the local government provided supportive funding for Longcom and other
companies that claim to use the IoT. According to Wei, the infrastructural cost of this IoT town
would be overly high for independent small producers. Even agricultural companies themselves
would encounter significant problems when developing, adjusting, and applying IoT systems.
40
Longcom had strong foundations and enviable government support. Its agricultural IoT
town project could be established and take off. In the meanwhile, D town had a geographical
proximity to Hefei city, where its residents were capable of consuming expanded local
production and tourism-oriented agricultural produce. Therefore, it would be more sustainable
for such a model.
40
Interview with Hou.
74
4.2 The Invisible Players
In developing networks established and powerful entities ally to oversee changes in a
process. In this making D town as an IoT town, the dominating player is Longcom, and the local
government provided strong incentives. This is a top-down decision. Many people win when
connections work to positive outcomes. The Internet connects, but it also disconnects. Things
gain power as agents; other players in the system are not so fortunate. The other players in this
area, the independent farmers and agricultural companies were invisible in the IoTifying of this
town. Thus, I move into the socially sticky consequences of automating change in farming
communities.
Hou
41
is a local grape farmer, with a relatively small family farm. She was married to a
local farmer three decades ago, and her family was one of the first grape growers in D town.
Back to the years around 2000, the local government persuaded farmers to shift to growing
grapes, and Hou’s family responded to the government’s call. At that time, the price of a pound
of grapes was less than 0.2 RMB.
When the whole idea of branding D town with the grape festival was born, the local
government decided to build a tourist center. However, the tourist center is far from Hou’s grape
farm. Since then, she has been commuting between her farm and the tourist center area to attract
consumers. The land close to the tourist center was either rented to non-local farmers as
relatively small plots or leased to agricultural companies as consolidated large-scale land. She
was in a dilemma now: her grape farm was not that popular due to its inconvenient location; she
can’t rent her farm to others, either, so she had to resume this form of livelihood as a small grape
farmer.
41
This is a pseudonym.
75
When asked about the IoT town here, it seems Hou didn’t know what that meant.
Similarly, the idea of establishing an agricultural IoT town was not well known among them. She
believed that the big agricultural company must have had strong government connections. Hou
still used a traditional way of irrigating and growing grapes. She and her husband were the only
two farmers on their 4-5 mu grape vineyard. They irrigated the grapes by blending water and
fertilizers, then drizzling this mixture onto grape plants, not even using the regular dripping
irrigation pipelines.
Hou was not the only person who was excluded by the decision makers who were
erecting an IoT town. In D town, there were over a thousand small family farms, that composed
most grape growers. A small population of these independent family farmers were local people.
The others migrated from nearby places. They rented land from local land owners.
42
The small
farmers I interviewed either had no idea what the IoT meant or merely had a vague or distorted
view of how the IoT worked.
A family from Lujiang, Anhui, for example, rented 20 mu land, the price of which was
1500 RMB per mu. Before migrating to D town, they had grown watermelons. They shifted to
growing grapes and, surprisingly, acquired grape growing techniques by themselves. They had
been here cultivating grapes for around 5 years.
Yong,
43
the husband, was quite proud of the grapes he grew. He touted the taste and size
of his grapes, and told me that his grapes were popular among tourists. However, he was
unsatisfied with the price gap between his product and those grown by Longcom and XA
42
In China, land is officially owned by the state. In rural areas, accordingly, land is owned by village
collectives. Rural residents thereby can only lease land out, while not allowed to “sell” land.
43
This is a pseudonym.
76
company (a famous grape grower; it used the IoT system developed by Longcom)
44
. When asked
about his attitudes towards the modern technologies that Longcom and XA company used, Yong
only knew that they employed a relatively advanced irrigation system. He said it was for strong
government financial support, that XA company could apply better technologies.
In contrast, Di
45
understood the IoT in a different light. He said that, the IoT town was a
way of uniting grape farmers in D town. He appreciated it because he thought this would curb
stiff competition among local small grape growers. According to him, grape farmers were very
isolated and always wanted to attract more customers, so they would wage a price war. If the IoT
town could be materialized, he expected that it would help unite local grape growers. He saw the
buildup of the IoT town as a trendy project. Di’s understanding of the IoT didn’t reflect
knowledge of operations in D town, however. The current state that interested him was that the
price of the grapes of Longcom.
In the decision making process at the local level, most agricultural companies didn’t have
much bargaining power. BO
46
grape company, established by the government, owned 300-mu
farm. Despite its government background, BO grape company was unable to weigh in to local
policy discussions of establishing an IoT town. The manager and employees of BO grape
company were confused about the IoT implied, just as the private grape raisers Yong and Di.
XA grape company was the demonstration grape site for the IoT technology. Before the
establishment of the IoT town, XA company had been renowned and gained its fame through
winning grape-growing awards. When government officials and other people would like to visit
44
This is a pseudonym.
45
This is a pseudonym.
46
This is a pseydonym
77
a grape farm, XA company’s grape farm was always selected, mainly due to its fame of
producing high-quality grapes. This was inseparable from its close relations with the local
government. Due to official preference, XA company images appeared in media news many
times. Its employees took pride in the product. Their grape greenhouses were larger and more
spacious, equipped with more advanced infrastructures.
XA company had been collaborating with Longcom for over a year. This company
applied Longcom’s automatic water-fertilizer system and grape monitoring sensors. In
Longcom’s central control room, I found XA company was connected to the system and I could
see XA company’s grape farms. However, the interviews with the manager and employees of
XA company showed that, they passively received technological help from Longcom. Because
XA company was a local role model, the local government intended to test how the IoT would
work using XA company as an experimental site.
4.3 The State Initiatives with Agricultural Technology Companies
Government initiatives committed to growth coupled with agricultural technology
companies to make IoT town transform and accelerate growth. The state and its private partners
were the decision makers. Other small farmers and agricultural companies remained invisible.
The business structures resemble how the state infused momentum into rural
industrialization in the early reform period, represented by the rise of Township Village
Enterprises (TVEs) (Hai, 1997). The market economy in China, at the first stage, was largely
constructed by the state. Alvin So (2009) argues the transformations occurring in the post-reform
China are “closer to the East Asian developmental state model than to the Western neoliberalism
model” (p. 50). He contends, “China’s development since the mid-1990s has ….departure[d]
from neoliberals” (p. 54). The state strengthened “managerial and fiscal capacity,” increased
78
intervention, and took a more active role in promoting “socialist ideologies.” Additionally, local
government upgraded educational and scientific foundations, assured the dependency of the
capitalist class on the state, reaffirmed the centrality of national sovereignty, and so constrained
power of international capital (p. 54-57) to promote private decision making. These features
characterize generally development governance in East Asian countries and Southeast Asian
countries, albeit with some variation. In China, the capitalist class and the bureaucratic class are
closely intertwined.
Local bureaucracy is critical to local development. Administrators function as the
representatives of the state and work to bridge the state and the rural populace. Local bureaucrats
head agencies that mediate state-society relations. Under changing institutional environments
like fiscal decentralization, incentivized local officials propel local economic development
(Meisner, 1996; Oi, 1999). The central government’s decollectivization and decentralization
policies thus promote “far greater bottom-up input than would be predicated from its formal
structures” which “are fundamental to the PRC’s resilience and adaptability” (Heilmann and
Perry, 2011, p.8). This guerrilla policy style features “policy-making as a process of ceaseless
change, tension management, continual experimentation, and ad-hoc adjustment” (Heilmann and
Perry, 2011, p.3), and grants more power to local bureaucracy.
In the rural development scheme, the local officials have the power to privatize collective
land, contract land, and approve development projects (Meisner, 1996). Meiser (1996) defines
the child of “the marriage of ‘the market’ to an entrenched bureaucratic apparatus” as a form of
bureaucratic capitalism” (p.300). It “refers to the use of political power and official influence for
private pecuniary gain through capitalist or quasi-capitalist methods of economic activity”
(Meisner, 1996, p.300). Similarly, Tsing (1998) found the dominance of “bureaucratic
79
entrepreneurs” in China’s economy, who bear both administrative roles and managerial
positions.
The affinity between political power and economic gains in rural China perhaps is more
visible than in urban China. Because the resources for development are scarce in rural Chin, the
distribution of the available resources remains more unequal.
With the transition from an industrial capitalist system to an information capitalist system
revolving around communications, technology companies gain. Those firms that connect up
businesses into communicative infrastructures become an influential social and political force.
For example, Dan Schiller (2000), in his tracing of digital capitalism, exposes how the US
government prioritized the commercial interests of telecommunications companies and put
corporate interests on top of public welfare. Digital capitalists lobbied for accelerated
deregulation and helped invent a commercial-interest driven digital sphere. The recent decade
saw the rise of gigantic information and communication technology companies, among which
are the transnational Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook network empires.
The information and communication technology companies in China have climbed in
social influence as well. The state’s ambition of restructuring the economy through “Internet +”
has reinforced the salient position of these companies. Through focusing on the township level
government, my fieldwork at D town complements the existing discussions on how the central
state caters to the interests of oligarchical Internet companies. It revealed the alliance between
the local government and agricultural technological companies in shaping the local development
pathway. This echoes what Dan Schiller (2014) coins as the “Chinese variant of state-led digital
capitalism” in which the state spearheads the expansion of a mode of capitalism that centers
around digital networking technologies.
80
5. Conclusion: The Global Digital Economy and the Agricultural IoT Hype
The economic boom brought about by digital technologies in the last several decades
problematizes conceptualizations of industrial and agricultural critiques of capitalism. In 1996
Manuel Castells grasped the networking possibilities of digital technologies. Network society has
become more prevalent as digital technologies connect people, things, capital, and information.
New systems continue to emerge. Innovation has become a god term. Entrepreneurship functions
as a management charm. The networking capacity of digital technologies has moved beyond the
urban center or developed areas to previously undernoticed regions, including the countryside
and the agricultural sector. Traditional processes become disassembled and reconnect in new
ways, largely without anticipating the range of social outcomes. Distributions of wealth and risk
are to be studied in the wake of these successes.
From a political economic standpoint, the key to conceptualizing such an expansion of
the network society is to inquire into the intersection of political apparatuses and market forces.
Herbert Schiller illuminated the intersection of dependence on ICTs and the market values which
prevail. He observed that, almost all the economic sectors unanimously rely on “commercially-
produced information” (Schiller, 1984, p.78). Capitalist logic produces information.
David Harvey (1989) argues the market-oriented information economy is a result of the
triumph of neoliberal ideologies in the major governments across the globe. Dan Schiller (1999)
observes the digital networks that comprise the cornerstone of the contemporary economy
originated from public service infrastructures. However, the neoliberal policies turned the
majority of them for corporate and commercial use.
Understanding digital technologies is inseparable from a thorough examination of the
current shape of capitalism. Following this line, Dan Schiller (1999) categorizes the
81
contemporary capitalist development as digital capitalism, explaining that in the current
neoliberal political-economic climate, governments prioritizing corporate interests accelerate
deregulation and help to invent a commercial-interest driven digital sphere.
Examined in the context of globalization, the role of transnational-corporations in
expanding digital capitalism and projecting the pivotal position of information in contemporary
society (Hart-Landsberg, 2013; Schiller, 2000). The battle between public interests and private
interests have tilted toward the private side, and public interests are subject to capital operation,
which endanger the living and working conditions of the marginalized social groups (Zhao,
2000; Schiller, 2000).
Situating digital capitalism in the Chinese context, Dan Schiller (2014) coins the term
“Chinese variant of state-led digital capitalism.” It highlights the way in which the state
spearheads the expansion of a mode of capitalism that centers around digital networking
technologies. Yu Hong (2017), in her book “Networking China,” documents the pivotal role that
the state designates to communications in uplifting the Chinese economy from post-2008
stagnation.
Based on a critique of the authoritarian state and liberal market dichotomy, Hong (2017)
points to “the state’s constitutive role in China’s evolving networked economy” and “market
elements in statist initiatives.” Her book focuses mainly on established communications
industries, such as telecommunications infrastructures, but she gave special attention to “(c)loud
computing and the internet of things, two most promising ICT applications.” Because from the
state’s perspective, cloud computing and the IoT are considered strongly potential to transform
the troublesome economy and social forms.
My research is built upon the political economy studies of communication. It expands the
82
existing macro-level examinations of the state-level forging of a digitally fueled economy by
zooming in on an agricultural IoT town in Anhui province, China.
This chapter unveiled the state’s ambition in appropriating the power of the IoT in
upgrading the economy and the agriculture sector. I also highlight the role of agricultural
technology companies in boosting such an IoT hype. My case of the agricultural IoT town
explicates the local-level mechanisms of how an IoT hype was created and rose to prominence.
State initiatives and ag-tech companies have created this IoT- realism in the agriculture sector in
China. The decision of making an IoT town was a government initiative which partnered with an
agricultural technology company. These two were the decision makers while other small farmers
and agricultural companies remained invisible. The next chapter describes how such a top town
mode of informatization resulted in alteration in the local agrarian power dynamics.
83
Chapter 3 The Agricultural IoT Town and Localized Digital Hegemony
Introduction
Agricultural practices are changing social relations under the pressures of integration the
IoT with local ways of living. The recent initiative extends urban networks into the countryside
to render agriculture more efficient and productive through greater efficiencies achieved by
integration of systems. The state-capital-technology project assembles into and extends
traditional power relations among local bureaucrats, technological companies, agribusiness, and
small farmers. In this chapter, I develop the construct “localized digital hegemony” (LDH) by
documenting the application of the IoT to D town’s grape farming and by analyzing the ways in
which the “digital” has been legitimized in labor control and domination. LDH becomes
instantiated in two respects: a labor control regime and a discursive, antagonist field of
contestation. The notion of a labor regime was developed by Michael Burawoy’s (1985)
observations of the politics of production connected to a local power structure. Labor and
production, of course, has been the subject of a long-lasting discussion about the social structure
in the agriculture sector. Burawoy’s concepts reflect both a material approach to the relations of
production and reproduction in agriculture and the discursive construction of “technological
superiority.” This localized digital hegemony is manufactured through legitimizing digital
technologies, and more importantly, legitimizing the centralized, capitalist ownership of digital
technologies. Antagonism in the form of discursive contestation assembles through acts of
questioning, foot-dragging, exhaustion, adaptation advice or new ties for adjustment. The field of
contestation may or may not gather into a counter-hegemony.
I show how the combined forces of state and capital that spiral information control for
purposes of management, efficiency, and disciplined uses of land and labor. The chapter works
84
through my top-down model of informatization continuing with D town as my case. The spaces
of control are identified by showing how acts of labor become arranged, connected and
interjected into connections with things. The top down model creates a self-building local system
of control, but in talk with small farmers, laborers adjacent to but separated from the system. The
disconnected, too, reflect and strategize on communication practices and appraising the (limited)
possibilities of the situation. I explain possibilities of counter-hegemony as both co-optation of
the instruments of informatization, expression of frustration, and adjustment to circumstance.
This counter-hegemony does not coalesce resistance into opposition, at least for now.
The plan of the chapter is a dialectical reading of the case. I construct and pose the
constructs of local hegemony and counter-hegemony. The discussion begins by setting out the
differences between traditional vineyards and those that integrate IoT systems. The composition
of the IoT system at Longcom’s and X Grape Company’s vineyards are described, together with
their appropriation of consent among employees. New company connections generate digital
(dis)connectedness as well. The hegemonic power of Longcom and the agricultural company
(formed on the basis of the IoT being superior) are presented; and. I show also how the
marginalized small farmers and left-out agricultural companies combat IoT fever. The chapter
moves beyond the local to enter the case into a broader, scholarly conversation on research and
the global digital economy.
1. The IoT Vineyards vs non-IoT Vineyards
1.1 IoT Solutions for the Grape Industry
The IoT hype added propaganda to the speculative reality that motivated state and ag-
tech companies to martial resources, plan, direct and change the agriculture sector in China. The
move to networking, automated systems, and informatization leads me to a discussion of altered
85
labor practices: How do people use the IoT in the grape industry? How does such work differ
from the traditional ways of cultivating grapes? More specifically, how does Longcom make IoT
interventions in grape cultivation in D town? The way in which the IoT is deployed to facilitate
or intervene grape cultivation changes work and affects labor relations. I do not work from a
technologically deterministic view. Rather, I tease out how technologies, under specific
institutional arrangements, exert social impact. On the ground inquiry is necessary, because IoT
material arrangements vary by area, crop, state, company, technology, labor, and community mix.
As the mix of materials vary, so do outcomes. Communication infrastructures are similar enough
to be interconnected, but their spread and interconnection generates distinctive configurations
and contingent outcomes. Grapes in D town offer a telling site for analysis.
Grape cultivation is labor-intensive. Each stage of cultivation requires deep participation
by manual labor. Farmers need to manually plant grapevines at the beginning of establishing an
orchard. Several rounds of pruning are needed for vine management throughout the year. In
spring, farmers have to prune excessive canes and leaves to make sure that grapes can receive
sufficient and even sunlight. In the early growing season, cultivators need to prune the vines to
retain a reasonable amount of nodes on each vine, ensuring the quality of grape berries. In late
autumn, workers have to conduct dormant pruning to keep a certain amount of fruiting canes and
select renewal spurs. As most table grapes are perishable and have thin skins, harvesting is
conducted by manual labor. To sum it up, grape cultivation is labor-intensive, and not quite
suitable for mechanization.
In the United States, where the level of mechanization in the agriculture sector is high,
people have found it challenging mechanizing grape cultivation. Despite the challenges, there are
two means of mechanization that prove to be feasible: re-engineering the vineyards to allow
86
machine operations and altering the grape variety to facilitate machine-harvesting.
47
The lashing
up of sensors, cloud computing, and quality tracing in the digital era drives the emergence of IoT
solutions to grape cultivation. For example, Auroras, an Italian startup, has developed a vineyard
management system that can monitor micro-climate conditions, grasp “the state of soil and
plants,” process data, predict intervention opportunities, send alerts, and help with decision-
making.
48
Similar solutions have sprung up in relatively developed areas as well. China’s grape
industry is expanding significantly. With growth informatization techniques are being entangled
with operations from the ground up.
1.2 Longcom and Its IoT system
Longcom is one of the trendsetters in the grape industry in China. These trendsetting
companies have embarked on a journey to standardize and automate the management of a
seemingly impossible task: vineyards vary by landscape, climate conditions vary by zone, and
grape berries vary by history, type, and hybrid. Pruning and harvesting cannot be accomplished
by machines. However, there are many aspects of cultivation that invite mechanization. The IoT
is integrated into aspects of grape growing, such as irrigation, fertilization, and crop monitoring.
Technical intervention does not conform to a static list, but is expandable to include adjacent
activities. For instance, information on local climate can be correlated with likely yield and price
or perhaps even with likelihood of tourist visits to the area. However, the IoT under analysis is
limited to grape production. For example, the company, Grape Steward develops IoT systems for
relatively large-scale grape farms. Its IoT grape management system has three functions: (1) the
47
As California's labor shortage grows, farmers race to replace workers with Robots
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farm-mechanization/
48
https://www.auroras.eu/more-healthy-grapes-with-save-grape-the-power-of-iot/
87
IoT equipment keeps the temperature, humidity, sunlight, and soil of greenhouses at the best
level through monitoring and adjustment. (2) System monitors can detect latent diseases through
diagnosing grape growth trends. (3) The information collected can provide guidance by
connecting to best practices and expert models.
As with Grape Steward, Longcom has developed an IoT solution at its grape orchard in D
town. This grape IoT solution consists of an integrated water-fertilizer system, a remote control
system, and a quality tracing system. This IoT solution, I argue, has created a localized digital
hegemony. This control structures manifests itself as a digitally hegemonic labor regime in the
Longcom vineyard by disciplining work. Additionally, the hegemony manifested itself as
Longcom, an ag-tech company, dominates the competitive landscape where local farmers and
agricultural businesses work. The hegemony is a spiral where IoT commands work internal to a
farming space while affecting work external to the space as well. The dialectic of local
hegemony is a construct placed in dialogue with Antonio Gramsci (1971), who produced a
seminal work on hegemony. Michael Burawoy extended Gransci to the construct of a factory
regime that controls industrial labor Agricultural informatization constitutes a local hegemony
because agri-localities are landed entities. The next section provides an analysis of the
hegemonic formation of the digital in Longcom’s vineyard.
88
2. Localized Digital Hegemony and Consent Making in the Vineyard
2.1 Hegemony and the Digital
Several centuries ago, unfettered from feudal constraints, capitalism evolved from scattered
sparks to rampant economic, political, and ideological forces in Europe. As one of the founders
of modern social science, Karl Marx recognized the capitalist social order was rooted in a
combination of economic exploitation and ideological reinforcement. Through legitimizing and
reinforcing dominant values and ideologies, the ruling class sustained its reign. The term “false
consciousness” invented by Friedrich Engels expressed his denunciation of the infiltration of
capitalist ideologies that obfuscated real production relations and class relations (1936).
Antonio Gramsci (1971) advanced the term “false consciousness” and captured the subtlety
of how ideologies were reproduced through manufacturing consent and accommodating
subversive resistance. He revealed the collusion between the state and the civil society in
manufacturing consent to ruling ideologies. As Gramsci (1971) wrote:
The normal exercise of hegemony on the classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is
characterised by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other
reciprocally without force predominating excessively over consent. Indeed, the attempt is
always to ensure that force would appear to be based on the consent of the majority
expressed by the so-called organs of public-opinion, newspapers and associations. (p. 80)
In his eyes, civil society functions to reinforce dominant ideologies through manufacturing
consent. In the meantime, the subordinate classes mount resistance to hegemonic power.
Resistance may be a counter-control strategy expressed through organized activities, like strikes
or boycotts. Often, particularly in response to local hegemony, resistance quietly proceeds but
sometimes flares up as a mix of obstruction and appropriation. This is subsequently termed as
89
“counter-hegemony” (Pratt, 2004).
Hegemony has been used in many contexts to analyze the unequal power relationship
among different social groups. For example, in the field of international studies, the hegemony of
one state over other states has been extensively examined (Murray and Worth, 2012). In studying
newsrooms in the media system, some scholars use media hegemony to describe how
mainstream values and ideologies infiltrate journalistic reports and news rooms (Altheide, 1984).
In general, hegemony has been well applied in many fields to underscore the discrepancy
between dominant powers and subordinate powers. From the standpoint of communication
study, control society and informatization hegemony is less studied. I focus on how consent and
coercion are strategically practiced to sustain hegemony with the result of a mix of collaboration
and resistance at the local level.
My research has informed me of how the “digital” has grown into a hegemony in D town.
“Localized digital hegemony” here appeared in two venues: a labor control regime forming a
politics of grape production, and a local power structure which transferred power to groups
working for, invested in, and supporting informatizing local spaces of the area. In this section, I
focus on the first aspect of the localized digital hegemony: the two vineyards where Longcom’s
IoT system was applied, including Longcom’s vineyard and XA grape company’s vineyard. The
system included the smart fertigation system, the central control room, the mobile terminals, and
the QR tracing system. I will elaborate on these components and how they constitute the venue
for hegemonic control.
2.2 The Smart Fertigation System
The smart fertigation system is one of the best developed operations at Longcom. The
mechanism that transfer data gathered by sensor to computing structures and control mechanism
90
can water and fertilize the grapes in an automatic and smart way. A traditional way of watering
grapes is regular irrigation, which is like watering regular plants. Ai
49
, a local farmer, who was
among the first grape growers in D town, still uses this way of irrigation. She confessed, due to
the small size of her vineyard, she was not motivated to upgrade to drip irrigation and
fertilization, a relatively sophisticated way to cultivate grape plants. Drip irrigation and
fertilization requires farmers to put a holed pipeline on the soil surface underneath the grape tree.
In this way, the fertilizer can be blended into water. Farmers would blend fertilizers into water in
a tank, from which the compound would flow into the pipelines to nurture each grape plant.
Most farmers in D town use drip irrigation in grape cultivation. Yue, a small independent
farmer who migrated from another region in Anhui province. He employed drip irrigation. At his
vineyard, the pipelines were fixed at the bottom of grape plants. He and his wife blended
fertilizers into water in a big tank connected to the pipelines. According to him, this drip
irrigation method saved water and functioned more efficiently than the traditional way of
watering and fertilizing.
Compared with these two traditional ways of irrigation and fertilization, Longcom and
XA grape company used a smart fertigation system to automate irrigation and fertilization. Right
next to Longcom’s vineyard, there was a well-built equipment room housing the machine
controlling the integrated system. The several-square-meter machine consisted of a computer, a
tank, and big pipelines.
The system was sophisticated. Tanks and pipelines were enlarged, true; but, it was a
smart automated computer-controlled system enabled by the newest IoT. Sensors collected data
and the system itself made fertigation decisions based on data analysis results. At Longcom’s
49
This is a pseudonym.
91
vineyard, there were several kinds of sensors. One kind measured the size of grapes and the state
of grape leaves. Another collected the conditions in grape greenhouses, including sunlight,
temperature, humidity, and soil moisture content. This integrated system makes decisions based
on information collection, data reads, and projections. The kernel of the apparatus was a unique
algorithm developed by AWL company, a spinoff of Longcom and its Israeli partner.
After employing this technology, people can almost free their hands and let the system
steer. It was claimed the benefits of this system included the following: fully blend water and
fertilizer; save water by 70%; avoid loss caused by mistakes made by humans; and make
fertilizing more effective. More importantly, the system was touted as significantly saving
human labor. It was acclaimed to be a game-changer. “Game-changer” is key trope in the
rhetoric of speculative realism. It signals the triumph of a new way of doing things and the
creative destruction of change. In the case of my agri-inquiry, the term signals the installment of
a local hegemony.
2.3 Consent-making at the Vineyard and Labor Process Theory
In my discussion, it appeared that hired-workers commonly were beginning to imagine
ways to appropriate technological devices for their own enterprises—either as innovative
contributions given the new contexts brought about by automated intervention or imagining
alternative things to make, do, sell, and cultivate. I have been inspired by labor process theory
(Cunliffe and Luhman, 2013). Despite that this set of theories was proposed to mainly explain
factory labor, I find it useful to understand the labor practices in agricultural sites. Agriculture,
just as the industry, is increasingly integrated into a capitalist chain. As it is not uncommon for
small independent farmers to turn into professional farmers, it is of importance to study how
92
wage laborers conduct farming on a specific site. Studying agricultural wage labor is not a
decontextualized field. It might develop more parallels with the industry.
Labor process theory has been a critical labor sociology theory. It explains how power
relations unfold in the process of transforming raw materials into products. Marx pointed
trenchantly to the secret of capitalism about capital accumulation, which was realized through
the labor process by utilizing wage labor to obtain surplus value.
Harry Braverman (1974) pointed to the substantive characteristics of labor, the
integration of “conception” and “execution”. He used “deskilling” to describe the degradation of
skilled labor into simple manual labor, which made the control of labor much easier. A seminal
work was Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, in which he explicated the degradation of
labor and attributed it to the deskilling of labor due to codifying labor rules or use of machines or
computers. Braverman (1974) wrote:
The ideal organization toward which the capitalist strives is one in which the worker
possesses no basic skill upon which the enterprise is dependent and no historical
knowledge of the past of the enterprise to serve as a fund from which to draw on in daily
work, but rather where everything is codified in rules of performance or laid down in lists
that may be consulted (by machines or computers, for instance), so that the worker really
becomes an interchangeable part and may be exchanged for another worker with little
disruption. (pp. 24-25)
In my research, I did find that the deskilling of labor surfaced at Longcom’s and XA Grape
Company’s vineyards. But it is different from industrial deskilling. As discussed above, grape
cultivating is labor intensive. Although Longcom and similar companies tried to apply the IoT to
automate it as much as possible, the cultivation process still needs manual labor to prune grape
93
plants. In D town, most small independent farmers had acquired the eye needed for the cut,
having been all-around growers, taking care of grape cultivation from the very first step to its last.
In the case of Longcom, farm workers concentrated on pruning, harvesting, and serving
the tourists. They didn’t need to be all-around workers. Selecting grape sprouts and providing
cultivating techniques were the job of experts and technicians. Irrigation and fertilization were
conducted by the smart fertigation system. Irrigation and fertilization were conceptualized as
susceptible to mistakes made by farmers. The way in which Longcom circumvented human
flaws was to use an IoT-informed integrated system. This is a type of deskilling for farming
laborers.
The labor practices at Longcom cannot only be framed as deskilling, but also as consent-
making around digital technologies. The authority of a controlling hegemony resided in the
established belief of the superiority of the IoT and the elevated status of machines. This relates to
the practice of consent-making proposed by Michael Burawoy (1979, 1985).
Among the critics of Braverman’s simplification of labor process, Burawoy presents a
more intricate politics of production. He (1979) argues that workers are initiative in accepting the
production order in capitalism, which is framed as “manufacturing consent”. He distinguishes
between “labor process” and “political apparatus of production.” He also invents a key concept
“factory regime” (Burawoy, 1985) to describe the overall political form of production. Such
politics puts into play consent and opposition at four places: the labor process, market
competition among firms, the reproduction of labor power, and state intervention. He identifies
several different types of factory regimes in particular eras and countries.
The factory regime he finds in monopolistic capitalism is “hegemony.” In this hegemonic
pattern, “consent prevails (although never to the exclusion of coercion).” As he wrote, “(n)ot
94
only is the application of coercion circumscribed and regularized, but the infliction of discipline
and punishment itself becomes the object of consent” (Burawoy, 1985). After Burawoy, many
scholars have conducted more field research, enriching the labor process theory and taking more
factors into consideration, such as gender, race, citizenship and so on. After Burawoy, they have
supplemented the connotation of class.
Lee Ching Kwan (1995) compares the “Localistic despotism” in Shenzhen with the
“familial hegemony” in Hong Kong, owned by the same enterprise and sharing many
commonalities. The managers constructed women as docile “maiden workers” in the former
company and “matron workers” in the latter one. She suggests “a reconstructed theory of
production politics is useful for theorizing gender in the industrial workplace.”
Steve Mckay (2007) analyzed the mechanics of controlling the sea men from the
Philippines, motivating gender and race identities. They were constructed with marginal
masculinity on the ship, being oppressed by the white from developed countries. However, they
were shaped as “new hero” in the Philippines.
Labor process theory has advanced from the industrial setting to include workers from
the service sector. My research advances and expands the established domain of labor process
theory, by demonstrating how the superiority of digital technologies constructs labor in particular
ways as well as invites enactment of counter-hegemonic actions. The consent that digital
technologies and machines surpass human labor was formed at Longcom’s vineyard. The next
subsection elaborates on the labor control regime at Longcom’s vineyard.
2.4 The Labor Control Regime
My interviews with Longcom’s employees at the vineyard revealed the critical role of
this smart fertigation system. The employees were quite proud of this state-of-the-art technology.
95
Luo, a manager in Longcom, had worked in Longcom for two years. He ascribed the ascendancy
of Longcom to the Internet + trend across the nation. He said, this system used the most cutting-
edge combination of the IoT and dripping irrigation technologies. He was confident that this
system would become the mainstream in the future. Luo and several other managers were in
charge this integrated system, while the other farming workers were not responsible for steering
the machine.
For most of the time, Luo worked in the business office at the tourist reception center.
Longcom’s vineyard is about two miles away from its office. Luo would ride an electric bicycle
to the vineyard to look around and talk to those who work there if necessary. He also had a
mobile app on his smart phone to monitor and manage the vineyard.
The other employees who farmed at the vineyard also applauded the integrated system as
convenient, smart, and great. One of the farming workers, Yao, came from Anqing and had
worked in Longcom for half a year. He was familiar with the grape varieties. He said that, the
integrated fertigation system was automatic, so they didn’t need to input labor into irrigation or
fertilization. When asked why the price of the grapes of Longcom was higher than the market
price in D town, Yao explained that, “the quality of Longcom’s grapes was better.” According to
him, part of the reason was that these grapes were cultivated with unusual technological
investment. The integrated system made sure that the grapes received the most scientific
nurturing.
They all knew that the equipment room was key to the vineyard. The superiority of this
advanced technology was firmly established. XA grape company, partnering with Longcom,
purchased this integrated system, and applied it at its advanced vineyards. Chen, a manager at
XA company, spoke high of the integrated fertigation system. In his opinion, the system was
96
“very convenient to use, smart, and efficient.” This integrated system made Chen think that it
was a good deal.
2.5 The Central Control Room and Mobile Terminals
An informatized system creates a local hegemony by expanding the existing vineyard
into a work space, tourist sight, and technological self-surveilling wonderland. The first floor and
part of the second floor of D town’s tourist reception center accommodated the agricultural
bureau and the tourist bureau of D town. The Longcom business center was located at the second
floor, right across the lobby to the agricultural bureau. Its central IoT control room was on the
third floor. The tourist reception center was at the entrance of D town. The juxtaposition of the
local governmental bureaus and Longcom’s IoT center indicates the official endorsement of such
an IoT-centered agricultural technology system.
In Longcom’s central IoT control room, there was a miniature model of D town and its
surrounding areas, a camera monitoring system, a sensor control system, and a big screen replica
of mobile apps. The miniature model of D town and its surrounding areas projected a well-off,
tidy, and technologically advanced blueprint. In the model, Longcom’s vineyard was at the
center, representing all the vineyards in D town. The model of its vineyard was cutting edge,
made of advanced materials and an automatic system.
In this central control room, the managers of Longcom were able to monitor what was
happening at the vineyard. The data collected by all types of sensors were viewable from the
central control room. As mentioned above, at Longcom’s vineyard, there were several kinds of
sensors. One kind of sensors measured the size of grapes and the state of grape leaves. Another
kind of sensors collect the conditions in grape greenhouses, including sunlight, temperature,
humidity, and soil moisture content. These data will be further transferred to a research institute
97
for further analysis. The small fertigation system can also be controlled in this central control
room.
Besides the central control console, the IoT system could also be accessed on mobile
devices. The managers were able to monitor the vineyard from their mobile phones as long as
they downloaded the app. In my interview with Xie,
50
a laborer at Longcom’s vineyard, said this
was a very efficient way of managing the vineyard.
As XA grape Company partnered with Longcom, its vineyard could also be accessed
from Longcom’s central control room. I saw that, Wei clicked the button for XA grape company,
and X company’s vineyard immediately popped up on the screen. XA grape Company didn’t
have access to the control system or the mobile app. The central control room and the mobile
applications were solely used by Longcom employees.
2.6 The Quality Tracing System
One of the solutions that agricultural players have figured out to food safety issues is to use
a quality tracing system. Before agricultural products are served at dinner tables, uncertainties
abound. Problems could have occurred at any stages: the seeds, the land, the chemicals, the
harvesting, the packing, the storage, and the marketing. Quality tracing systems have been
developed to help consumers monitor every stage of agricultural production and circulation.
Through such a system, every stage becomes monitorable. The customers would know where
everything is coming from.
Longcom has branded such a quality tracing system as well. It tested this system for
different agricultural producers with different agricultural products. For example, it has set up a
quality tracing system for peppers. Similarly, it has started such a thing at its vineyard in D town.
50
This is a pseudonym.
98
Through this system, consumers can trace every step of grape farming, and what chemicals have
been used in the process.
The technicians in Longcom received training on how to update the system and manage the
quality tracing system. Despite that the system would automatically jog down the relevant data,
the technicians have also become the mediators between the natural surroundings and customers
who would like to see what the formation of such agricultural products.
The IoT system worked in the vineyard to control consent-making practices of IoT among
employees and farming laborers. Additionally, the hegemonic formation of the IoT also
generated social and technical differences through the digital connectedness and digital
disconnectedness of people, things, and biotic materials. Further, the distinctions result in the
class resonant differentiation between the technologically advanced and the “technologically
laggard.”
3. The Hegemony and Digital (Dis)connectedness
3.1 Agriculture as an IoT Spectacle
A solid field in communication and media studies focuses on evaluating the differences
between the digitally connected and the digitally disconnected. In the era of the Internet, access
to the Internet is at the center of public discussions and scholarly investigations. The digital
divide, mapping how different groups of people can access the Internet in different degrees, is
one of the five main domains that scholars have focused on (DiMaggio et al. 2001).
It has long been assumed that connecting to the Internet itself is critical (Norris, 2001).
Therefore, piles of statistics have been gathered on who are connected, what the percentage of
the digitally connected is, and what the digital divide looks like between the connected and the
disconnected. Access to the Internet, as widely acknowledged, is the first step of taking
99
advantage of the Internet. When thinking about the connected and the disconnected, these studies
see human beings as the research objects. The focus is somewhat constraining and understates
attributions and manifestations of agency.
I argue that, in the era of the IoT, a key issue should be the access of “things” to the
Internet. In other words, whether “things” are digitally connected or disconnected may lead to
inclusion or exclusion of attributed agents and acting agencies. Therefore, it makes great sense to
explore the implication of whether and how objects are connected or disconnected to the Internet
or digital networks.
The IoT was designed to connect “things” to the Internet. Here, the grapes and the grape
farms were connected to the Intranet controlled by Longcom and to the more general Internet
through Longcom. Longcom became the node through which the connection was accomplished.
Through connecting “things” to the Internet, the things are turned into a spectacle of
attraction. Vineyards are places of natural beauty, true. The IoT added the aura of advanced
technology and labor optimization. Additionally, the link between things creates a pool of
information that can be connected with other information in processes of flow and circulation.
These acquisitions in turn are moved to projections that imagine alternative ties among labor and
land activities in areas marked by the state and market for development. Before the invention of
the IoT, these things were present in a physical sense, but not present in a digital sense. With the
IoT, those things which are connected suddenly become digitally present. They can be traced,
monitored, and even altered.
Similarly, the IoT has changed agriculture into a hybrid spectacle. Just as mass media
created sports, cultural, political, and economic spectacles (Kellner, 2003), the IoT gives rise to
the spectacle of processes reimagined, reworked, and triumphant. Agricultural practices have
100
been by and large hidden from the public, as the public can merely consume the final products of
agricultural production. The IoT, unprecedentedly, turns agriculture into a spectacle. The
employees in Longcom were able to view the whole thing from their central control room.
Through the quality tracing system, consumers can spectate the whole process of agricultural
production and transaction by conveniently scanning the QR codes.
When agriculture is turned into a spectacle, not all the things are connected in the same
way. There are things included and things shunted by the systems. Winners and losers shake out.
In the case of D town, the issue of (dis)connectedness became a stake for social groups and
individual actors. Who or what could be connected, how and when constitutes the core of the
question. Longcom’s vineyard was tied to not only the control room, but also the data center for
information recording, data extraction and projective analytics. XA grape company was also
connected, but for most of the time, it was unable to monitor as the control room was located at
Longcom’s office building.
In contrast, the small independent farmers were not able to enjoy this connectedness. They
still employed traditional, experience-informed, context-specific ways to monitor and manage
their grape farms. The Longcom’s blueprint does incorporates small independent farmers into its
enterprise. However, in reality, the farmers do not so much benefit from the buildup of IoT
infrastructures as to function as parts in the machinery of production.
In the case of D town, Longcom was in full control of the system, from design,
management, to maintenance. Though XA grape company was registered in the system, it did
not have a direct stewardship role. The ownership of the IoT system was centralized in a
commercialized application of technologies. Certain players overshadow other players in the
application of this system. What would happen if the IoT system was designed and controlled by
101
a different configuration, perhaps even a collective ownership? This requires future explication
of a different case.
3.2 Agriculture as a Media Spectacle
Furthermore, the media saturated world is more accessible to Longcom and XA Grape
company. For a long period, agricultural farming, the fundamental of human life, is unknown to
consumers. The consumers can only see agricultural products. Grocery stores eliminated the
opportunity of consumers meeting farmers, leaving only the products to be selected by
consumers. In some cases, farmers’ markets connect consumers with farmers who grow and
harvest the products.
With the development of media saturation apace, it is important for companies to secure as
much as media attention as available. Longcom, without doubt, was under the spotlight. Articles
on the grape industry in Dawei appeared in newspapers frequently. The orchard received
attention by several mainstream media outlets. Each acclaimed the advanced IoT system and
made general comments on the functionality of this system. State sources echoed the praise, as
the official website of Baohe district described Longcom’s ability to
… promote smart management and integrated fertigation technologies… to diversify
grapes. Under the auspices of high-tech weapons, grapes in Dawei received awards as the
‘pollution free’ mark use right and A level of national green agricultural products.
51
51 Six gold medals and five outstanding awards! Dawei grapes shined at the National Grape Annual
Conference (Liujin wuyou! Dawei putao quanguo nianhuishang defang guangcai 六金五优！大圩葡萄全国年会上
大放光彩). Accessed from
http://www.baohe.gov.cn/DocHtml/1/17/08/00199814.html
102
Longcom’ media presence was remarkable. In the CNKI database, there were 33 articles about
Longcom. These articles got further spread online. It also appeared on mainstream media
platforms as well. The agriculture and military channel of CCTV invited Longcom for a
conversation. The CEO of Longcom was lauded as an innovative entrepreneur who successfully
integrated agriculture and the IoT. XA grape company has similarly been the target for media
reports and the official site for D town’s grape festival. They are very much connected. Their
vineyards are tied to the Internet through IoT systems. They are visibly connected into the media
saturated world. A local hegemony secures its standing by becoming digitally visible; only then
is hegemony achieved—a homogeneous representation of life and labor work and product
putting into frame an area. The small independent farmers and some other agricultural companies
are disconnected in their work and from the media. They are doubly marginalized in this
digitalized local hegemony.
3.3 Differing Official Endorsement
In speculative realism, success builds on success to transform a dated system into the
compelling wonders of technologically controlled and ordered area. Encapsulating the whole D
town as an IoTs town, Longcom has obtained official endorsement. It is celebrated as a
technologically advanced pioneer, representing how digitally informed D town is. As mentioned
in the previous section, the official endorsement that Longcom has obtained led to the high-
profile media acclaim and media visibility. Subsequent government funding and rhetorical
awards tilt towards Longom and those labeled as digitally advanced.
This digital technology-centered belief glorified the status of companies like Longcom--
while discounting the status of the small independent farmers. Although there is no official
discourse on them, compared with Longcom, they were automatically sliding into the category of
103
the digitally laggard. This constitutes the barrier for them, among other barriers, to expand their
farm sizes or simply maintain a way of life.
Local hegemony pulls small farmers into a disadvantaged position. Huang came from
Chaohu. He chose to migrate to D town to grow grapes because several of his relatives probed
this way of livelihood and made it quite well. He brought his wife and child to D town, renting
10-ish mu land and having a portable one-story house next to his vineyard. Since then, his family
had been leading a life centering around the vineyard. They became the guardians of their
vineyard. Increased security needs appears to be a price of machine-integrated vulnerable
systems that generate media attention and become locatable within the grids of travel.
Huang’s vineyard was next to his relatives’ vineyards and they were located along one of
the main streets in D town. In the tourist season, like most of other small farmers, Huang would
set up a table in front of his vineyard, on which there displayed the samples of several varieties
of grapes and self-made grape wine. Huang and his wife would alternate in sitting by the table to
tout for custom.
When asked about the IoT technology and the meaning of the IoT town, Huang was upset.
He said, “we didn’t have that. It was because those companies had deep connections with the
government, that they could have built more advanced greenhouses and they could use these
technologies.” He felt this was unfair. He felt that he was a laggard in applying these
technologies. This technological laggardness was constructed in contrast to the escalated status
of the IoT system and of technological innovation in general.
3.4 Flawed Humans Vs Flawless Technologies
The mapping of the potential of a counter-hegemony in a local space is not
straightforward. Opinion poll surveys disclose attitudes, but the structural embeddedness of
104
control requires dialectical inquiry that investigates possibilities of opposition, resistance and
contestation within the broader arrangements of labor-regimes in an area (or nation) for a time.
Every technological revolution brings about controversies over technology-human relations. In
the industrial revolution, the fact that factory owners replaced workers with machines panicked
them into vandalizing machines. The tensions between programmed robots and those people
whose jobs may be endangered repeat those historical events. It is interesting why people would
have that firm belief in machines and technologies and think them as free from flaws. Humans
are considered inclined to make mistakes. Meanwhile, the relatively low cost of machines,
compared with human labor, has driven the replacement of humans by machines.
Longcom touted its integrated water-fertilizer system as smart, labor-saving. Li, a
manager, told me that the IoT system at Longcom could make grape farming 10 times more
efficient: the work used to be done by 10 people could now be finished by one person. With the
help of sensors, cameras and computers, Longcom’s managers were able to view what farm
operations. Longcom endeavored to divert humans away as long as technologies could cope with
agricultural work. The managers and farming workers I interviewed were very proud of the IoT
system, and they believed that digital technologies could outperform manual labor. The ideology
of technical confidence legitimizes and manufactures consent among farm workers. Those who
are inside the system are proud (until eliminated); for those outside, the belief takes on different
weight. Specific outcomes vary from migration, to lowered expectations, to search for
alternatives—and likely more. Li viewed the IoT as the future trend.
Chen, in her 50s, a laborer for Longcom, was working on picking grades and packing
them into boxes. She had been there for half a year. She worked on a fixed schedule, 6 am to
11:30 am and 3 to 6 pm. There were 9 workers at Longcom’s vineyard, all of whom followed
105
this schedule. For the peak grape-picking season, there were usually two workers staying on duty
for the noon period. In the peak season, when grapes were ripe and almost ripe, they would pick
grapes, help customers pick grapes, and pack grapes into boxes.
Jobs were flexible. Employees also acted as tour guides for visitors. When I asked them
to introduce grapes for me, they briefly explained the major varieties of grapes grown at the
vineyard. Their knowledge of how to grow grapes appeared useful to curious visitors.
Throughout the seasons, employees needed to conduct several rounds of pruning for
grapes. As mentioned above, grape farming still requires extensive, judgment sensitive labor.
However, the application of the IoT system has replaced part of the necessary human labor with
machines. The smart fertigation system, the central control system, and the quality tracing
system have made grape farming more manageable from the managers’ perspective.
Local digital hegemony brings the wonders of the Internet into disruptive practices of
change that newly connect, reconfigure, selectively extract, and push local product. Hegemony
provokes counter-hegemony, in sometimes sporadic, tentative responses. The dialectical
movements of counter-hegemony constitute the subjects of the next section that discusses how
local small farmers agonistically contest and/or appropriate official rhetoric, media highlights,
and the discourse of the IoT as superior.
4. Counter-Hegemony
4.1 An Overview of Counter-Hegemony
The dialectics of hegemony and counter-hegemony come into being with the
informatization of agriculture. The great bulk of existing research on the conceptual tool of
hegemony examines the antagonisms among different social players for power. For example,
social movement literature focuses on confrontation between the polity and movement
106
participants (e.g., Carroll and Robert, 1996). Counter-hegemonic forces work to confront, coopt,
and overthrow dominant ideologies by generating alternative framing networks where
dissatisfactions, uncertainties are expressed, reaching toward horizons of sustenance and survival,
and rendering questions of social injustice immanent and social visions necessary. Therefore, it
is clear counter-power endeavors struggle to dissolve dominant or official rhetoric and form
alternative framing strategies.
Studies on agricultural practices have deployed dialectical inquiry to explain tussles
between agribusiness and small independent farmers as well. The sweeping expansion of a
global corporate agro-food system is a dominant expression of the rise of a neoliberal order
(Held, 1999; McMichael, 2000). The negative consequences of this system have provoked anti-
globalization movements, fair trade advocacy, and other alternative and oppositional practices
(e.g., Marsden, 2000; Murray and Raynolds, 2000; Shreck, 2005).
Ravenscroft and Moore (2013) have examined community supported farming as a
counter-hegemonic practice against industrial profit-centric farming. They find consequential
civic meaning in seemingly inconsequential moments of “liquid leisure” reflected in
community supported agriculture, which actually reconfigures the politics of land and the
human-nature relations.
Aimee Shreck (2005) interrogates the counter-hegemonic potential of the Fair Trade
Movement in resisting what appears to her as a global corporate agricultural system. She teases
out positive and negative aspects of such a movement, then maps the penetrating influence of
hegemonic forces in the agriculture sector. One issue always at stake is a complex mix of
questions of justice and geography: Are the economic profits are fairly distributed between
producers and distributors and between the South and the North.
107
Jack Kloppenburg (1991) demonstrates the meaning of local knowledge, in contrast to
scientific agricultural knowledge, in creating a sustainable agriculture. Shelly Feldman and Rick
Welsh (1995) also highlight the challenge that local knowledge and feminist practices form to
hegemonic assumption of progress and development from a scientific perspective.
Similar to this line of research on local knowledge, James Scott (1995) observes how the
subordinate, including the peasantry, practice “everyday forms of resistance.” Unsatisfied with
the lop-sided focus on “visible events,” such as peasant rebellion, he unveils that domination and
resistance are in constant interplay, as reflected in everyday practices. He highlights the less
visible cultural and symbolic resistance, including foot-dragging, false compliance, and feigned
ignorance.
These studies provided a context for shaping my research into how local small
independent farmers challenge dominant ideologies surrounding the IoT, digital buildup. Using
the above-mentioned conceptualizations, I have categorized the counter-hegemonic practices of
farmers in D town into the following: personal relations (producer to consumer – direct links),
use of mobile pay, and deconstructing official rhetoric.
4.2 Personal Relations (producer to consumer links)
Despite the relative disadvantaged position, small independent farmers discover and
create various ways to protect themselves from plunging into worse situations. In this section, I
explain these protective techniques.
Longcom and XA grape company established status with a fame and popularity that
attracted tourists. Apart from the standard fare, small growers of grapes in D town made great
efforts to attract tourists to their own vineyards. The efforts turned away from participating in
media saturated channels. Rather, invitations became personal, informal, a matter of presence. A
108
distinctive homespun aesthetic resourced the variation and warmth of experiencing the local as a
matter of hospitality, style and welcoming. As D town was very large and most of the vineyards
were located deep into the town, grape growers deemed it necessary to attract tourists and lead
them to their vineyards for grape pickup.
Right beyond the D town grape festival sign, grape growers began to stand along the road,
displaying samples of their grapes to attract people. They were expecting to attract customers
with the tempting freshness and tastiness of their grapes. Outside of the tourist center, there were
stands for grape growers to tout their products. The rent for a single stand was 800 RMB per year.
A few grape growers would rent this place to display their grapes, increasing the visibility of the
small businesses.
Besides those who rented stands, there were more grape growers roaming around in the
entrance area displaying their grapes to attract tourists. If anyone is interested, the grape grower
would lead him or her to the vineyard and the tourist could help with grape picking. Labor
became part of an optional piece of the tourist experience. According to Ai, this personal touch
helped her to get customers. Upon seeing the good quality of her grapes, some customers would
be tempted to do picking at her farm, in spite of the relatively long distance between her farm
and the tourist center. Sometimes, the illusion of remoteness to can add to the special quality of
experience. Therefore, even in the heat of mid-summer, there were still many grape growers
standing along the road, as they knew that their presence, the sight of the grapes, and a taste
would be rewarded with customers.
Yue and his wife were very successful in securing a good number of customers.
According to Yue, the quality of their grapes was better than a lot other producers because of
their expertise. They would give customers their business cards, and would also deliver grapes if
109
the customers were living in the nearby city. Their sharing of their grape-growing stories
contributed to the popularity of their grapes among customers.
4.3 The Use of Mobile Payment Technologies
The PC-based Internet economy has made a mobile turn in the last decade. The
ascendancy of smart phones has dissolved the barriers to mobile usage of the Internet.
Accompanying the emergence of the mobile Internet, mobile payment has grabbed a substantial
number of users due to its convenience. Despite that the digital economy in the US is leading the
world, China outperforms the US in popularizing mobile payment services. The annual
transaction amount of mobile payments exceeded 150000 billion RMB, and the penetration rate
is strikingly high, 77%.
52
The reason China is fascinated by mobile payments has been discussed.
53
It is without
doubt that mobile payments have deeply penetrated into every region of China. It is not a
surprise that a person would mobile transfer the payment to the vendor when purchasing a pound
of tomatoes at a farmers’ market. Similarly, mobile payments almost became a norm among
these small independent farmers. Just like Longcom and X Grape Company, these small farmers
were adept users of mobile payment technologies. They’ve got smart phones and printed the QR
codes for WeChat Pay and Ali Pay for customers to use. Yong, a small independent farmer, had
52 China is leading the world in mobile payments; The penetration rate is as high as 77% (Zhongguo
yidong zhifu lingpao quanqiu pujilv gaoda 77% 中国移动支付领跑全球 普及率高达 77%). Accessed from
http://news.cctv.com/2017/12/04/ARTIUwVpGyhCl7uRrOI38ZvE171204.shtml
53
Kuhn, Anthony. In China, A Cashless Trend Is Taking Hold with Mobile Payments. June 29, 2017.
Accessed from https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/06/29/534846403/in-china-a-cashless-trend-is-
taking-hold-with-mobile-payments
110
the QR codes for WeChat Pay and Ali Pay printed and hung them at his grape stand. He said it
was convenient for his customers to make payments.
In the current stage, the IoT is an expensive technological assemblage that only capital-
rich entities can afford. Small farmers whose land size is modest and whose capital accumulation
is tight can’t even think about the possibility of setting up the IoT solution. What they can afford
is the platform-based low-threshold mobile pay usage.
In such a town where the IoT became the signature brand enshrining the town, the bottom
up grassroots usage of information technologies still surfaced. For those farmers who haven’t
reaped benefits from the IoT movement, the established platform-based mobile pay
complemented their digital sentiments. Longcom and XA grape company also used the QR codes
of mobile pay for customers to make payments. This is situated in the prevailing of mobile pay in
China.
Another established means of doing business for small farmers in general is to take
advantage of e-commerce platforms. However, due to the difficulty transporting grapes, most of
the farmers I interviewed were not using Taobao or other e-commerce services.
4.4 The Grassroots Sentiment – Deconstructing Official Rhetoric
Most of the small farmers that I met expressed great pride in the quality of their grapes.
54
They have formed a sentiment that the relatively less digitally advanced grapes were still good.
However, there is a discrepancy in their views of the more digitally advanced grapes grown at
Longcom’s and XA grape company’s vineyards. Some people were envious of the IoT solution
54
Their grapes were mainly for immediate consumption. So it was important for these farmers to attract
tourists to their vineyards to pick up grapes.
111
that Longcom and XA grape company had, but some other people would contempt them as not
capable of growing good quality grapes.
There is one thing commonly commented by these small farmers: the deep connection of
Longcom and XA Grape Company with the local government and the solid financial bases that
they have. For example, Cao was a grape grower who owned a 35 mu orchard. He came to D
town because his wife’s family members had been growing grapes here for a long time. His wife
and he took care of everything in the orchard. As a relatively young farmer, he actually tried to
start e-commerce to sell his grapes and “local eggs” (ben jidan 本鸡蛋). But as he was not very
experienced in packing grapes or eggs, it was not a very successful attempt.
When asked about the opinion toward XA grape company, he was convinced the quality
of their grapes was better. However, he gave the following reason: “The local government has
invested a lot in their vineyards. Even if they are not able to sell out their grapes, the local will
help them or reimburse them.” He thought this was one of the major differences between XA
grape company and his own orchard.
Similarly, Lv, who migrated to D town from another region in Anhui province, expressed
his dissatisfaction with the connection between XA grape company and the local government. He
was not convinced the quality of the grapes at XA’s vineyard was superior. According to him,
the fame that XA grape company owned was primarily the result of government support.
In this section, I discussed three counter-hegemonic practices: personal relations
(producer to consumer – direct links), use of mobile pay, and deconstructing official rhetoric. It
can be seen the superiority of the IoT system for vineyards is contested by smallholding farmers.
The IoT systems are developed and appropriated by Longcom, an agricultural technology
company, and XA grape company. These farmers are disconnected from this advanced
112
assemblage of technologies. However, they use their personal connections to combat the
technologically advanced competitors in selling grapes to tourists. Their use of mobile payment
tools indicates their creative appropriation of affordable technologies, given that the IoT solution
is unaffordably expensive. Meanwhile, their resistance to a digital hegemony is reflected in their
destruction of official rhetoric. In such ways, the local vineyards become fields where hegemonic
and counter-hegemonic forces are constantly in tension.
5. Conclusion: The Global Digital Economy and the Localized Digital Hegemony
My research expands the existing macro-level examinations of the state-level forging of a
digitally fueled economy by zooming in on an agricultural IoT town in Anhui province, China. It
illustrates the genesis of such an IoT hype and how it affects local power dynamics.
This chapter analyzes the impact of this IoT hype on the local power dynamics. The
overriding belief in digital advancement and its materialization at a specific agricultural
technology company shapes a specific power regime. Under such an alliance of government
initiatives and corporate domination, I have observed how the “digital” has grown into a
hegemony in D town. I argue that, this kind of centralized, capitalist ownership of the IoT,
shapes a localized digital hegemony.
My term of “localized digital hegemony” is manifested in two aspects: a labor control
regime, developed upon Michael Burawoy’s (1985) conceptualization of the politics of
production, and a local power structure, which derives from a long-lasting discussion about the
social structure in the agriculture sector. This localized digital hegemony is manufactured
through legitimizing digital technologies, and more importantly, legitimizing the centralized,
capitalist ownership of digital technologies.
113
A top down model of state sponsored business creates a local hegemony. Informatization
adds to the hegemonic investments a control structure that serves the purposes of management
and production but also connects to tourism and transience through media saturation. Media
saturation couples press interests, social media platforms, and the play of technology and labor at
the site of cultivation. As hegemony and counter-hegemony constitute a dichotomy, there also
exists a “localized digital counter-hegemony,” meaning that local farmers use new media
technologies to churn out living spaces for themselves and resist against the hegemonic power of
the ag-tech company and agricultural businesses. I have found three ways in which local small
farmers counter the digital hegemony: establishing personal relations; use of mobile pay;
deconstructing official rhetoric.
The localized digital hegemony is the local reification of the global digital order, in
which technology corporates and nation states advance capitalist development while sacrificing
the interests of other social groups (Hong, 2017; Schiller, 1999; Zhao, 2000). My case of this IoT
town has grounded political economic research at the local level. It exposes how domination
through digital technologies is constructed and reinforced by the agricultural IoT company as
well as how the marginalized small independent farmers are confronting domination through
everyday forms of resistance.
114
Chapter 4: A Responsive State and the Rise of E-commerce in Agriculture
Introduction
Small, independent farmers appropriate e-commerce to sell agricultural products. This is
the topic of the case study for this chapter. The case is located in information gathered in a
township located in southern Anhui. The county is deemed relatively backward in economic
development. It is not an area with large-scale arable land. The land in this township is rather
scattered. Due to the specific ownership regime, farm properties are owned by a nest of
independent farmers. Each owns a small plot. In this chapter, I document how networked-
agricultural practices emerge by articulating the specificity of these cobbled-together practices
and by mapping their functions in the local political economy. The case is presented here to
pursue (in the following chapter) the bottom up, some lateral social consequences of agricultural
informatization.
The chapter conducts critical inquiry of a local, bottom-up case of informatization, where
a local rural project is self-organized through imaginative uses of technology. The plan of the
chapter is to read developing digital technologies against local efforts. Initially, the chapter notes
how e-commerce and agricultural e-commerce are spreading with great anticipation. I introduce
Ming, the protagonist of the story. The second section overviews the movement of e-commerce
platforms into rural China--drawn forward by changing urban markets. I document e-commerce
policies in Anhui province, then return to the local story of Ming and trace how his business rose
to success. Ming’s agricultural enterprises are presented, in interactions with infrastructural
buildup of major platforms. The responses of local government to Ming’s needs are identified.
The chapter ends with a summary of the role of a responsive state in a platform-based, bottom-up
networked market economy.
115
1. E-commerce and Agricultural E-commerce
1.1 E-commerce and the China miracle
Rolf A. E. Mueller (2000) defines e-commerce as “business transactions conducted over
the Internet” (p. 1). E-commerce brings into play quite variegated business practices. Vladimir
Zwass (2017) defines such exchange as “maintaining relationship and conducting business
transactions that include selling information, services, and goods by means of computer
telecommunications networks” (no page number). The advent of e-commerce results from its
advantages over traditional business on many fronts. Online shopping, purchasing, and
scheduling delivery reduces transaction costs, shortens physical distance, and lowers entry
barriers (Zwass, 2017). To put it simply, e-commerce benefits both business and consumers.
There are several major types of e-commerce: B2B (business-to-business), B2C
(business-to-consumer), and C2C (consumer-to-consumer). In B2B, businesses make
transactions with one another, mainly to satisfy production and operation needs. The other two
types, B2C and C2C, are familiar to online shoppers and cater to consumer needs. Amazon,
Tmall
55
, and Jingdong are B2C sites where businesses sell products to consumers as the end-
users. For example, on Amazon, consumers can shop for products either provided by Amazon
itself or third-party businesses. C2C marketplaces offer more space for small businesses and
individual sellers. E-bay and Taobao are good examples of this C2C form.
China was not a place where successful e-commerce could succeed, or so it was expected
only a decade ago. In 2008, Maris G. Martinsons published an article, “(r)elationship-based e-
commerce: theory and evidence from China.” The professor of management at Hong Kong
University inquired into “why e-commerce in emerging markets like China is less developed and
more challenging than in established market economies like the United States” (p. 331).
55
Founded by Alibaba.
116
According to his thinking, the conditions that guarantee the development of e-commerce systems
are absent in China. Essential ingredients for e-commerce expansion include coordinated supply
chains, instant Internet access, trust, credit systems, and delivery systems.
Martinsons postulated that the barrier to e-commerce in China was its under-developed
market economy, a market economy in a western sense. The term “relationship-based e-
commerce” derives from “relationship-based commerce.” This practice underlines the
importance of who you work with or “Guanxi” in business. “Guanxi” structures markets in two
ways: the network among businessmen and the businessmen-government connect. This
“relationship-based commerce” to Martinson resembles trading favors more than it does the
function of an orthodox market economy. Furthermore, he predicts e-commerce would be the
enemy of the party-state because it would threaten the power of the state in controlling the
economy.
Martisons was far from alone. Insufficient confidence in China’s e-commerce
development was once widely found among policy makers, journalists, and scholars (e.g., Bin et
al., 2003; Logan et al., 2004; Ma et al., 2003; Wong et al., 2004). Ten years have passed since
Martison published his predictions. The growth of e-commerce in China has proved his and other
expert views wrong. China now surpasses the United States in e-commerce. In 2016, the amount
of online sales reached 5.2 trillion RMB (760 billion dollars), and is expected to increase to 1.7
trillion dollars by 2010 (Goldman Sachs, 2017). More impressively, the mobile payment market
in China is “11 times the size of the U.S. market” (Marinova, 2017).
Communication infrastructure buildup underpins the explosive growth. The lack of credit
systems still persists; but, e-commerce platforms developed their own financial tools. For
example, to battle consumers’ concern with product quality, the pioneering Alibaba introduced
117
Zhifubao (Ali Pay), a software that can mediate between consumers and online retailers.
Consumers can either fund Zhifubao or link cards to it, and online retailers won’t receive
payments unless consumers receive products and confirm that they have received them.
Meanwhile, delivery systems grew along with e-commerce platforms. It is not an exaggeration to
say China’s online retailing gives the fastest delivery service in the world. Consumers can expect
their products to arrive in two days, or even a few hours.
The logistics barriers claimed to preclude the growth of e-commerce in China have been
smashed. More importantly, the argument that China cannot nourish e-commerce due to its
nonorthodox market economy was proved wrong. The market economy with Chinese
characteristics not only fuels e-commerce, but it also benefits from the unprecedented
ascendancy of online retailing. The legitimacy of the party state gets boost due to ICT-enabled
economic activities. The party state supports technological innovation. These initiatives and
technological advancements expedite economic growth, from which the party state draws
legitimacy.
1.2 Agricultural E-commerce
Among the various items that are transacted online, agricultural products have the special
characteristics that appear to hinder development. The online potential for agricultural products
is enormous, but several hurdles exist. The quality of agricultural products is frequently a worry.
Lack of official standards leaves safety in the hands of unknown producers. A consensus
supports the widespread use of QR codes. These enable consumers to trace the origins of each
single product. Additionally, it should be noted that the delivery system for agricultural produce
differs from regular ones. In particular, the cold chain logistics, with much higher costs, are not
widely available for agricultural businesses.
118
BtoC agricultural e-commerce services are one thing. E-commerce practiced by many
independent farmers is another. Farmers sell their produce online. CtoC (consumer-to-consumer)
creates a bandwagon e-commerce movement. Alibaba’s Taobao as a platform connects farmers
to an online market. Their products appeal to a wide range of consumers. On these platforms,
anyone can access the websites and view the profile of different “stores.” Whenever they find
anything interesting, they could initiate chats with customer representatives for more details or
even price bargaining. This represents the more orthodox “impersonal” market model.
Some other people use instant messaging services to sell products. For example, WeChat
sellers can add friends to their lists. They can chat for detailed information, make orders, and
transact money through WeChat Pay. Another function of WeChat, Moments, enables the sellers
to post images of products offered to be shipped. Businesses post pictures of products, which can
be received by other customers. Both the “personal” Taobao model and this WeChat model can
be categorized as social e-commerce.
Undoubtedly, a mixture of CtoC platform e-commerce and social e-commerce has been
tapped into by some sellers. Ming, among all the seasoned young businessmen, adeptly masters
this mixed e-commerce skillset and achieves enviable success in agricultural e-commerce. I was
working on another project about return migrants. One of the local officials was helping me find
interviewees. She connected me with Ming, speaking high of Ming’s achievements. Later on, I
began to know more about Ming’s experience and his role in the local agricultural network. This
case features Ming and the agricultural network centering around him. After graduating from
college, Ming found a job in a first-tier city; but, he became bored by the urban life. Born in a
village and to farmers, he was deeply rooted in “soil society.” He saw his village as a treasure
land, and his long-cherished hope was to start an agricultural business in his hometown. The
119
value of good-quality agricultural products was very much accepted and a point of pride for
Ming. His ambition resonated strongly with the flourishing of e-commerce, sparking his
movement toward his own e-commerce enterprise. The skyrocketing of his own business is
inseparable from the development of e-commerce within the county and across the country.
E-commerce in agriculture is not entirely new. Together with the prosperity of e-
commerce in general, the agriculture sector has been deeply penetrated. Agricultural producers
purchase materials and sell products online. China constitutes the biggest e-commerce market in
the world, and agricultural e-commerce has expanded enormously. In 2004, the value of online
traded agricultural goods exceeded 100 billion RMB (approximately 15.7 billion US dollars),
composing 3% of all the agricultural trades. In that year, there were about 3000 sites for
agricultural product transaction (Yoo, 2015).
56
The value of digitally traded agricultural products
reached 150 billion RMB (approximately 23.6 billion US dollars), and the number is estimated to
achieve 800 billion RMB (approximately 125.7 billion US dollars) in 2020, with an annual grow
rate of 40%.
57
The foreseeable potential of agricultural e-commerce has drawn the state’s attention. As
the helmsman of agriculture in China, the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) aims to deepen the
integration of agriculture and e-commerce. In the “Development Plan on National Agricultural
Products Processing and the Integration of Three Industries in Rural Areas (2016-2020)”
56
Eva Yoo. (2015). E-commerce trade of agricultural goods over $16 billion US in 2014: State media. Jul,
13. Accessed from https://technode.com/2015/07/13/agricultural-goods-traded-online-go-16-billion-us-2014/.
57
The Ministry of Agriculture. (2016). The Ministry of Agriculture: The value of agricultural products
traded online would reach 800 billion RMB in 2020 (Nongyebu: 2020nian nongchanpin dianzishangwu jiaoyie
dadao 8000 yi 农业部: 2020 年农产品电子商务交易额达到 8000 亿). Accessed from
http://finance.sina.com.cn/china/2016-11-29/doc-ifxyawmp0541558.shtml.
120
(Quanguo nongchanpin jiagongye yu nongcun yiersan chanye ronghe fazhan guihua 全国农产 品
加工业与农村一二三产业融合发展规划), agricultural e-commerce was proposed as one of the
key solutions for rural economic development. The MoA policy enjoins state officials to:
“Support the innovation of distribution and business models, start e-commerce experiment sites,
help new agricultural operation entities land on national and regional agricultural e-commerce
platforms, encourage and guide large e-commerce companies to open agriculture-related
businesses.”
58
Meanwhile, in the development of e-commerce and agricultural e-commerce, the
role of major platforms, such as Alibaba’s Taobao and Tencent’s WeChat is critical. I will
elaborate on their roles in the next section.
2. The Penetrating of Platform-based E-commerce in Rural Areas
Alibaba has revolutionized the business sphere in China. Founded in 1999 as an online
business-to-business marketplace, Alibaba grew to a conglomerate with B2C, C2C platforms,
financial services, health care services, and media sectors. For Chinese consumers, the best-
known Alibaba is Taobao and Tmall. In particular, Taobao, a C2C marketplace, is home to
around 9 million businesses, primarily small businesses.
59
The take-off of Alibaba coincided with the increasing penetration of the Internet in urban
areas. There were about 22.5 million Internet users in 2000, and this number rose to 111 million
in 2005, and to 772 million in 2017.
60
Among these users, urban residents account for a larger
percentage than rural residents. In 2005, 17.4% of the netizens were from rural areas, and the
58
Ibid.
59
Accessed from https://www.douban.com/note/609885979/?cid=50936085.
60
CNNIC. Statistic report on the development of the Internet in China (2001/01). Statistic report on the
development of the Internet in China (2006/01). The 41
st
China statistical Report on Internet development (2018/01).
121
percentage rose to 28.6% in 2014. In this year, there was a total of 470 million urban netizens,
and the number of rural netizens was 178 million.
61
Hopes drive the high-speed rocketing of e-commerce, but concerns about market
saturation loom large. The state seeks a “spatial fix” to sustain e-commerce development. The
relatively underdeveloped rural market appeals to ambitious urban-oriented e-commerce giants.
In 2014, Alibaba, for example, claimed to invest 10 billion yuan (approximately 1.59 billion US
dollars) in propagating e-commerce in rural areas, aspiring to a new round of leadership.
62
The
infrastructure boost anticipates growth in consumption by rural residents.
Tonglu town in Zhejiang province was selected as the first experimental site. The concept
was to make a whole village a Taobao online store--different from the individual multiple online
store model. Alibaba establishes a center in a village, where there is Internet connect with a
computer and a huge screen. Some specially trained Taobao technicians inform and help
villagers who learn to purchase or sell products online. If a villager wants to buy a pair of pants,
she/he could ask the specialist to order and make a payment if satisfied with them. Similarly, if a
local resident intends to sell agricultural products or handmade crafts, she/he could contact the
Taobao center, and the specialists would take care of photographing the products and selling
61
CNNIC. Report on the development of the Internet in rural areas in 2014 (2015/05). Accessed from
http://www.cnnic.net.cn/hlwfzyj/hlwxzbg/201506/P020150623466458430466.pdf.
62
Alibaba Initiating Thousand County Ten-thousand Village Plan; Investing 10 billion yuan in three to five
years (Alibaba qidong qianxian wancun jihua zai san zhi wunian nei touzi 100 yi 阿里巴巴启动千县万村计划 在
三至五年内投资 100 亿). Accessed from http://new.qq.com/cmsn/20141013/20141013044443.
122
them online.
63
Tonglu network activities have been replicated in other areas, constituting
Taobao’s “Thousand County Ten-thousand Village Plan” (qianxian wancun jihua 千县万村计
划).
64
Jingdong, an example of B2C model, has got a firm hold in this scene as well, aiming to
become a model rural market. In particular, partnering with the pivotal state’s “poverty
alleviation project,” Jingdong has been helping agricultural producers in poor regions. In January
2016, Jingdong signed a contract with the Poverty Alleviation Taskforce of the National
Congress. From the Jingdong’s side, the major task is to sell agricultural products to cities. In the
last year, it missioned in 832 “Poverty Counties” and sold 3 million plus products for over 20
billion RMB (approximately 3.1 billion US dollars).
65
Alibaba and Jingdong, the “duopoly” in China’s e-commerce, have expanded tentacles to
county towns, townships, and villages. Their well-crafted market ambitions coincide with
different levels of governments’ developmental goals, paving way for their gigantic market
coverage (Li, 2017; Makinen, 2016; Roberts and Chen, 2015).
63
The first experimental site of Alibaba’s “Rural Taobao” settles in Zhejiang Tonglu (Alibaba shouge
“nongcun taobao” shdian luohu Zhejiang tonglu 阿里巴巴首个”农村淘宝”试点落户浙江桐庐). Accessed from
http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2014-10-16/11049700274.shtml.
64
Alibaba Initiating Thousand County Ten-thousand Village Plan; Investing 10 billion yuan in three to five
years (Alibaba qidong qianxian wancun jihua zai san zhi wunian nei touzi 100 yi 阿里巴巴启动千县万村计划 在
三至五年内投资 100 亿). Accessed from http://new.qq.com/cmsn/20141013/20141013044443.
65
Jingdong online stores are open in villages (Jingdong wangdian kaijincun 京东网店开进村). Accessed
from http://news.sina.com.cn/s/2018-01-25/doc-ifyqyqni2234986.shtml.
123
Carmen Leong and her coauthors find that, in two villages, Zhejiang province, local
grassroots leaders, e-tailers, service providers, and institutional supporters formed “self-
organizing e-commerce ecosystems” (Leong et al., 2016). Grassroots leaders, who pioneered e-
commerce and radiated their skills to other villagers, initiated such ecosystems. With the
knowledge of e-commerce grew, more regular villagers joined the systems with different
capacities and working on different roles. Institutional supporters, represented by the government,
facilitates system renewal.
“Rural Taobao” not only connects villagers to the markets. The platform also enables the
flow of products produced by rural residents into urban areas. Some of these products are light
industrial products. Some are agricultural products, the focus of this study. Food safety issues
have haunted urban consumers for quite a few years. Exponential development, under-regulated
in terms of environmental and social impacts, brings about water pollution, soil pollution and air
pollution. Some agricultural products are found to be planted in heavily polluted soil, watered by
industrial liquid waste, and unsafe to consume. Chemical abuse tarnishes the quality of
agricultural products. Anxieties about food quality have stimulated different responses. A report
on the consumption behavior of 2 million users on GegeHome, an application specifying on food,
reveals that “local produce” (tutechan 土特产) was sold out at a much faster rate than other
products. The most popular produce are Linan potatoes, corns, Chinese yam, and local eggs
(tujidan 土鸡蛋). The report explains foodies love “fresh, local, and organic” food the most.
66
66
The first report on the online shopping data of the middle class. What are the 2 million middle class
eating? (Woguo shoufen zhongchan shipin wanggou shuju baogao. Liangbaiwan zhongchan douzai chishenme? 我
国首份中 产 食品网 购 数据 报 告，两百万中 产 都在吃什么?). Accessed from
https://club.1688.com/threadview/47881248.html
124
In 2016, transactions of agricultural products on Alibaba surpassed 100 billion RMB
(approximately 15.7 US dollars), with a growth of 40%, higher than the growth rate of Alibaba
company.
67
Among all the agricultural products, nuts, tealeaves, and dietary supplements have
claimed the largest market share. Several types of agricultural products are gaining popularity,
with a higher growth rate than the most popular items. Popular produce includes vegetables, egg-
products, meat, processed meat, and rice and noodles. Even though these goods face more
difficulties in transportation and delivery, the network purchase and distributions of these foods
are changing the landscape of agricultural e-commerce.
68
Phillip Huang and Yusheng Peng (2007) identify three historical trends that contextualize
agricultural change: the rising size of non-agriculture employment, the declining rate of
population growth, and the changing structure of food consumption. These trends affect how
food is grown, how agricultural produce is processed and transacted, and how the agricultural
sector is regulated. Making agricultural production greener and rendering its products safer has
become the new pursuit.
Corresponding to these urban needs, some farmers have started selling their good-quality
agricultural products online under the catchwords of “green” and “organic” (yuanshengtai 原生
态)
69
. Urban consumers place their hopes on obtaining quality products offered online. Building
67
Report on Ali’s agricultural e-commerce: The top 10 categories and top 50 counties in agricultural e-
commerce, who are they? Analysis of consumer behavior and trends (Ali nongchanpin dianshang baogao:
Nongchanpin dianshang 10 da pinlei he 50 qiangxian, Kankan doushi shui? Haiyou xiaofeizhe tezheng he qushi
fenxi 阿里农产品电商报告：农产品电商 10 大品类和 50 强县, 看看都是谁? 还有消费者特征和趋势分析.
Accessed from http://news.wugu.com.cn/article/1015714.html.
68
Ibid.
69
The literal translation of 原生态 is primitively ecological. I think “organic” is also appropriate here.
125
trust is essential to e-commerce generally; perhaps it is even more important for perishable
products. Trust in market purchases is diminished when food safety incidents are publicized. The
challenge to establish trust between consumers and sellers offers an opportunity to rebuild
credible sources by implementing alternative relationships. E-commerce for regular consumer
products require some confidence in a purchase; however, the perishability, intimate nature of
agricultural produce likely renders trust and credibility an especially important feature of food
transactions. Agricultural e-commerce platforms are open to public comments. On Taobao and
other CtoC platforms, the accumulated pool of customers has generated tons of comments, which
inform new customers and assure loyal customers of food quality.
E-commerce generates and depends upon social e-commerce. Social e-commerce evolves
through chains of commentary indicating satisfaction and problems with a service. For example,
Taobao provides a chatting tool which enables communication between consumers and sellers.
However, the most representative type social-ecommerce in China exists on WeChat. WeChat is
an instant messaging application developed by Tencent, one of the major technology companies
in China. Built on the success of QQ, another major instant messaging tool, Tencent trumped
other tech companies in social networking. The releasing of WeChat in 2011 marked a turning
point in China’s social media world. It is undoubtedly one of main factors that lead to the
downing of Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging service in China.
WeChat is more than an instant messaging tool. Its “Moments” function enables users to
post pictures and texts, like blogging. It has a WeChat “Wallet” where users put money and
complete a variety of monetary transactions, from booking movie tickets to paying utility fees.
There are also mini-stores on WeChat where small businesses find customers. This package of
126
functions drags WeChat into its standing as the most popular application in China. In September
2017, the number of daily active users on WeChat achieved 900 million.
70
Similarly, this package of function, as well as its extreme popularity, attracts agricultural
producers to WeChat for business. Consumers have to friend sellers to initiate conversations and
view sellers’ profiles and moments. On Taobao, consumers would usually access sellers’
products information first, and then seek direct communication with sellers. On WeChat,
consumers have to add sellers first, and then view products information and make orders. After
completing orders, they can use WeChat pay to transact money. Therefore, on WeChat, trust is
somehow built into initiating ties before transactions are made. The WeChat model also sustains
long-term trust relations. This individualized, segregated network of agricultural e-commerce,
exemplified by WeChat-based practices, is a strong rival to the C2C model of e-commerce.
The township where this case was found is exemplary of places where small independent
farmers constitute major agricultural producers. The township that I studied is located in Anhui
province. The ranking of Anhui province in terms of GDP is overshadowed by its relatively
outstanding performance in agricultural-ecommerce. In 2016, Anhui ranked the 13
th
in GDP
among the 31 provinces.
71
As one of the “central area” provinces (zhongbu shengfen; 中部省份),
Anhui’s economy, despite of substantial growth, has encountered problems such as relatively
70
WeChat release statistical report: Active users amounted to 900 million in September (Weixin fabu shuju
baogao: 9 yuefen rihuo yonghu 9 yi 微信发布数据报告: 9 月份日活用户 9 亿). Accessed from
http://tech.163.com/17/1109/15/D2QEM3P000097U7R.html.
71
Ranks of China’s provinces’ GDPs in 2016 released Anhui ranks the 13
th
(Zhongguo 31 shengshi 2016
nian GDP paiming gongbu Anhui weilie quanguo di 13 wei 中国 31 省市 2016 年 GDP 排名公布 安徽位列全国第
13 位). Accessed from http://news.aq.ahhouse.com/html/2512190.html.
127
weak industrial basis, locational disadvantages, and stagnant development. To redress the
crippling economic factors, Anhui has committed to agricultural e-commerce as a top priority.
3. Anhui and Agricultural E-commerce Initiatives
3.1 Anhui and the provincial level policy
The market size of agricultural e-commerce has already been gigantic, and its potential is
imagined in terms of exponential growth. Different provinces have different standings in this
carnival. In Alibaba’s report, the following provinces are assessed to have the best performance
in agricultural e-commerce: Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Shanghai, Anhui, Shandong, and
Fujian.
72
Anhui is only one of a select set of cases, but the locality offers insight into the policies,
political-economy, and material, biotic features of informatization.
In 2017, Anhui provincial government initiated a project that sought to place e-commerce
networks into villages in full measure. Until October 2017, 75 out of the 76 counties (including
cities and districts) had county-wide e-commerce public service centers. All the counties had e-
commerce delivery centers. Village-level e-commerce stations had been established in 14034
villages, and more than 300 thousand rural residents received training. Meanwhile, there were
more than 5000 registered rural e-commerce entities. Among all the products that are traded
online, fresh produce is the leader.
73
As the barriers to fresh produce e-commerce are overcome,
the regions with signature agricultural products prosper.
72
Ibid.
73
Anhui: Rural e-commerce supports the employment of over 500 thousand people (Anhui: Nongcun
dianshang daidong yu 50 wanren jiuye 安徽:农村电商带动逾 50 万人就业). Accessed from
http://ah.anhuinews.com/system/2017/11/27/007757305.shtml.
128
Dangshan county, famous for its pears and peaches, made a stunning performance with a
transaction amount of agricultural e-commerce of 3.16 billion yuan (approximately 501.72
million US dollars). This success would not be possible without strong governmental support, e-
commerce platform’s space, or the passion among local people.
3.2 Nanban county and Fengyi township: The Agricultural Pattern
The case that my project focuses on also blends these three elements. It is in a southern
county in Anhui province. This Nanban county,
74
as mentioned above, is categorized as an
agricultural county, where the industrial foundation and progress are not comparable with other
economically advanced counties. Nanban county offers several signature agricultural products.
Like many other villages in southern China, the land size per capital is quite low, less
than 1 mu per capital. Most of the agricultural producers own a small plot of land. Some of them
would complement the livelihood with laboring in paper mills. As with many other rural areas in
Anhui province, Fengyi township is a place from which migrants depart, often to the cities.
Fengyi has a traditionally established paper making plant, which encourages not a small number
of people to stay in hometown. Those who migrate to cities for job opportunities may rent out
land or leave it fallow. In Fengyi, there are about 5 relatively large-scale agricultural producers.
They sell both vegetables and poultry.
3.3 The Bottom-up Initiatives and the Response of the State
In Nanban county, the government supports agricultural development initiatives by
adjusting incentives to encourage and support bottom-up demands and market changes. The
motive driving e-commerce platforms to expand into rural areas, as well as the opportunity-
seeking motive of agricultural producers, overtakes established business strategies. Struck by the
74
This is a pseudonym.
129
power of e-commerce, the local government started to back fully its rise by adopting supportive
policies. The fire was lit on local small farmers. The farmers felt the sweeping power of e-
commerce and began to creatively integrate e-commerce into traditional agricultural businesses.
E-commerce gave to residents an opportunity to cash in on the so-called green agricultural
products by connecting through the platform to previously unreachable consumers. The relations
made markets. Consider the startup business in Fengyi township and Ming, a local resident
turned agricultural entrepreneur.
Fengyi township
75
is located in Nanban county, about 8 miles away from Nanban county
town. It has a population of approximately 20,000. The famous artisan of paper making in
Fengyi town was the major sector that made it a famous e-commerce town. There are about 6000
people working in the paper-making industry. About 380 households do online business. In late
2016, the township party committee and government established Fengyi branch of Nanban
county E-Commerce Association. The signature paper-making industry and local government are
mutually supportive. Fengyi township is the leader of Nanban’s e-commerce development. More
than 10 delivery services cover this township and every village was served by extended delivery
services. Delivery vehicles include the state-controlled postal office as well as private services.
Product transport to consumer networks came into being primarily because of e-commerce traffic.
These supply-chain services shared relationships with e-commerce businesses. A platform
company would send staff to pick up items from these businesses. This saves time and facilitates
e-commerce transactions. Meanwhile, for certain e-commerce businesses, these services would
lower the price to incentivize business growth.
75
This is a pseudonym.
130
Fengyi town is surrounded by mountains and its industries are not well developed. Its
environment is generally regarded as “yuanshengtai” (natural). The pleasant environment
appears to resonate for consumers with the quality of produce. The beauty of the area appears to
be in harmony with expectations of quality product. Logically, one does not necessarily imply
the other. However, quality poultry and meat do come from the area. Ming turned these
associations into a robust, local informatization project.
4. From a Family Farm to a Successful Startup Agricultural Company
4.1 The Beginning of the Story
Ming returned to the rural area from Shanghai, where he had found a job but was
reluctant to stay. He recognized a local business opportunity and became driven by the
determination to devote himself to his hometown. A remote childhood memory drew him to go
back to his hometown, as he said, “our family was not well-off, but we were happy at that time.”
He had been mulling over this idea since high school. Before taking a serious move into this
business, he did some research on fresh produce e-commerce in Shanghai. This market research
yielded a few findings. His major discovery was that, if he became the supplier for major
platforms, such as Vegemanagemanager ( 菜管家), there would hardly be any profit for him. He
made a risky decision to start his own business with his own brand, with a focus on free-range
poultry farming. Ming had been away from the soil of his hometown for a while; but, his parents
had stayed and retained farming knowledge.
In 2011, before quitting job, Ming began to experiment with his agricultural enterprise.
After scouting for a fine place, he asked his parents to purchase a large batch of baby chickens
and start raising them. One year later, he officially left his job in Shanghai and embarked on this
mission. In the first two years, he worked hard but he was hampered by knowing little about
131
poultry. Expectations for success were unrealistic. He bought too many baby chicken and ducks.
This brought about many difficulties. Besides oversupply, he had little understanding of how to
sell them to the market. He tried do door-to-door selling. For example, he went to Shanghai to
ask if some businesses would like to cooperate with him. This did not go well.
Ming’s poultry farm was located in the deep mountainous area, and at first it did not
even have electricity. This location posed challenge to transporting materials such as feed.
However, he persevered, stayed in the area, and insisted that his product was needed because the
area was a symbol of “good quality.” The limitation of funding made him unable to recruit help.
Therefore, the only people who worked in his farm were his parents and himself. His was a
family farm.
4.2 Business Growth
As a college graduate, Ming had some knowledge of online marketing. Like most of his
peers, he knew much about online surfing and was well taught in basic Internet skills. While
raising baby chicken, ducks, and animals, he began to document his experience and post the
diaries online. He knew how to make his activities visible to people on Baidu. His persistence in
making the chicks and ducks visible generated good results, which increased his visibility and
generated a substantial number of customers. I use the term “e-commerce literacy” to refer to the
skillset for e-commerce success. I elaborate on this term in the next chapter. In terms of offline
marketing, he reached out to rural tourism restaurants to sell area-raised authentic pork and
poultry.
Beautiful it may be, but the area was not easy to work. Supplementary feeding was
required. Feed was difficult to be transported to the deep mountains. In 2013, while retaining the
family farm in the mountain, he moved the management quarter to a place close to the main road,
132
where some chickens and ducks were raised. His sister, who also had a bachelor’s degree, came
back to help him manage business. The years between 2013 to 2015 witnessed fluctuations in his
agricultural business, as he made some inappropriate market and operational decisions. In 2015,
with the steady growth of his business, he registered the company, opened a main office in the
industrial campus in the county town, and employed several people in management. His whole
business shifted to the online market. He closed down the supply commitments to local
restaurants or customers. It was more profitable to sell to customers in other regions. The local
area, relatively underdeveloped, was not lucrative and local customers were unwilling to pay
higher prices.
A challenge occurred. The pool of customers grew to such an extent that he could not
meet demand. His own supplies were limited. This propelled him to seek help from other farmers
who raised good-quality chicken, ducks, and fowl. He began his search in nearby areas. His
criterion for partnership was that an allied farmer should provide “organic” products, differing
from industrialized chicken farms. His ability to expand the customer pool and find partners in
supplying agricultural products made him well-known in the local animal husbandry
businessmen. Ming’s business success was built upon a platform economy where Taobao,
WeChat, and other major e-commerce oligopolies established both online and offline
infrastructures. The model was spreading rapidly.
4.3 Platform: Online Imperialism and Offline Infrastructure as a Great Leap Forward
4.3.1 Platform setting the rules
When Ming first started to sell products, he used Taobao as the primary market place,
just as many other small agricultural producers were doing. According to him, Taobao was quite
friendly to small businesses at that time, providing appealing promotions. In recent years, he also
133
used WeChat to market his products. On WeChat, he developed over 1000 customers,
maintained personal connections, and sold products.
Taobao business became not as inviting to use and manage sales as it was earlier days,
Taobao platforms charged more money from small businesses over time. Even its 11·11
festival
76
was only useful for big sellers, not the small individual sellers. It became more difficult
for individual sellers to top the search list on Taobao. As Anthony Li (2017) observed,
Some media reports have already suggested that Taobao has altered some policies
unilaterally at the expense of rural e-tailers. After all, the e-commerce platform managed
by Alibaba is by no means "neutral" but rather is embedded in the listed company's urge
for profit maximisation. (p. 59)
Therefore, Ming looked for ways to circumvent Taobao, and he was thinking about developing a
personal application, exclusively for himself to sell products.
In either cases, with Taobao or a new exclusive application, the importance of mobile
platforms is self-obvious to platform connected producers and markets. The age of the World
Wide Web faded away, replaced by the ascendancy of digital platforms as people became
increasingly dependent upon these for information access and everyday activities (Jin, 2015).
The most commonly available platforms are social networking sites connected to smart phone
systems.
José van Dijck (2013) defines platforms as “the providers of software, (sometimes)
hardware, and services that help code social activities into a computational architecture” (p. 29).
Concerned with the fact that “(p)latforms can be situated within more general capitalist processes
76
Taobao invented this festival. The 11.11 single’s day is also a recent invention, and Taobao was the first
to announce this day as the huge-discount online shopping holiday.
134
that follow familiar patterns of asymmetrical power relations between the West and the East, as
well as between workers and owners, commodification, and the harnessing of user power,” Jin
uses “platform imperialism” to trace the imperial origins of how platforms are constructed in the
current global world (p. 14).
In China, indigenous platforms prevail, instead of US-originated platforms. On the one
hand, the Great Fire Wall obstructs connection with Western platforms; on the other hand, the
cultural relevance of these platforms gains popularity among Chinese users. Despite the
debatable West-East imperialist construction, a tension dividing the ambitions and motives of
large numbers of platform users and small number of owners exist.
In Ming’s case, his entire business would not have been possible without Taobao or
WeChat. Taobao’s website provides opportunities for small farmers to reach virtually the whole
national market. WeChat enables him to strengthen relationship with his customers and some
suppliers. The offline delivery system is a spinoff of the e-commerce boom. Some delivery
services are directly owned by major platforms such as Alibaba and Jingdong. The others are
also catering to e-commerce traffic. Ming’s entrepreneurial initiative burgeoned in this
facilitating environment where platforms set up both online and offline infrastructures.
These platforms also set rules that profoundly affect how agricultural businesses are
practiced. The ranking algorithm on Taobao, for example, pressures the sellers to 1) frame
products with popular keywords; 2) increase the number of transactions and 3) obtain as many
positive reviews as possible. First, for those sellers who are not familiar with customer mentality,
it might be hard to precisely frame products. Second, for small sellers, it might be a difficult
thing to obtain a large number of transactions. This would put them in a disadvantaged position
in the online market. Third, customer review management is challenging. Agricultural products
135
are perishable. The fault of quality may be in storage, preparation or use by consumer, who
blames the product. In addition, the stereotypes that urban consumers possess about the magic of
“organic” goods might create overblown expectations. Ming’s products, he claims, are grown
with extra care to be “organic.” However, he received negative reviews online from some
customers who complained about the “nonauthenticity” of his products. For example, some eggs
that he sold online were relatively smaller than regular eggs. This was complained by some
customers. As a veteran e-commerce seller, Ming has developed a set of courteous and
convincing messages to reply to these negative reviews.
4.3.2 The trajectory of China’s e-commerce platforms
Digital platforms are necessary, useful, and available to small sellers. E-commerce giants
are celebrated as liberating forces in connecting small sellers to a vast online market. Sellers
pursue alternative on and off line connections. Practices change in response to opportunities and
constraints of local market and platform squeezes on business. Therefore, as mentioned above,
when Taobao decided to charge more money from small businesses, these small businesses are
vulnerable. Meanwhile, the strategical moves of e-commerce platforms in China, as argued by
some observers, are favoring big businesses than small businesses. Taobao, for example, is
pushing for “new retail.” “New retail” highlights the convergence of online and offline selling,
the globalization of e-commerce, individualized consumption scenes based on big data, and
entertained consumption.
77
This strategical focus means that new ways of retailing will replace
“pure” online retailing. Alibaba has invested in Yintai Business, Suning, Sanjiang Shopping,
77
Battle: how can medium and small-sized businesses win Taobao’s new retail game (Shizhan: Zhongxiao
maijia ruhe wanzhuan taobao de xinlingshou 实战:中小卖家如何玩转淘宝的新零 售). Accessed from
http://www.100ec.cn/detail--6394366.html.
136
Lianhua Supermarket to build a more robust offline storage and delivery systems. Specifically, it
has provided investments to Tiantian Fruit Market to access offline fruit markets.
78
Those big
businesses capable of constructing online-offline convergence are more likely to be the winners
of the “new retail” game than small businesses. Accompanying these changes, statistics show
that consumers are increasingly inclined to purchase products from major online supermarkets on
e-commerce platforms.
79
Small businesses can take advantage of this “new retail” trend as well.
Some suggest that micro-entrepreneurs can improve their interaction with customers to facilitate
transactions.
80
Others propose that small agricultural producers can collaborate with newly-built,
specialized agricultural supermarkets established by giant corporates, including Hema Fresh
Food founded by Alibaba.
81
78
The growth rate of Alibaba e-commerce GMV fell to 22% An analysis of the future development of e-
commerce platforms (2017 ali dianshang GMV zengsu xiajiang zhi 22% dianshang pingtai weilai fazhan qushi fenxi
2017 阿里 电 商 GMV 增速下降至 22% 电商平台未来发展趋势分 析). Accessed from
http://www.askci.com/news/chanye/20170707/163413102454.shtml
79
Small retailers will be abandoned by e-commerce (Xiaoshangjia jiangbei dianshang paoqi 小商家将被 电
商抛弃). Accessed from http://read.bbwc.cn/NC8xNS83Ojo3.html
80
ibid.
81
The relationship between “new retail” and fruits is more than “make you buy crazily”! (Xinlingshou yu s
huiguo de guanxi, yuanlai buzhi “rangni maifeng” name jiandan 新零售与水果的关系，原来不止“让你卖疯” 那
么 简单!). Accessed from http://www.sohu.com/a/218714695_611036. “New Retail” fuels the goal of “One Thousan
d Dollars per Mu” The product of more than 100 counties get into Da Runfa market (Xinlingshou zhuli muchan Yiqi
an meijin jihua Nongcun taobao yu baixian nongchanpin ruzhu darunfa 新零售助力 亩产 一千美金 计 划 农村淘宝
逾百县农产品入驻大润发). Accessed from http://www.techweb.com.cn/news/2018-04-19/2657025.shtml.
137
The trajectory of China’s e-commerce platforms from introducing online transactions to
bombarding e-commerce into rural areas, then to entering into the era of “new retail” is telling of
platform imperialism. Along this trajectory, the power of small retailers is changing.
The importance of platforms in agricultural e-commerce is self-obvious. Besides the
potency of platforms, the role of the local government in facilitating this platform-based
economy merits attention. Platform push is accompanied by local government pull. The next
section describes the relationship among the state, platforms, and micro entrepreneurs.
5. The Responsive State in a Platform-based Market Economy
Ming worked toward independence in the early stages of expanding his business
operations. He mastered media tools to boost visibility of his products and accumulated a
steadily growing pool of customers. After he moved the management office to the main road, his
business was better known by his customers, including local officials. Starting from then, his
business got more recognition by the local government, which brought- with him policy bonuses.
Last year, he was featured in a program about successful young entrepreneurs produced
by the official television of the prefectural city. Through the official propaganda, he was set as a
role model for the post-80 and post-90 demographic group. He was granted an award in leading
local e-commerce development. He established a company, and this company was selected by
the local agricultural bureau as the prefectural-level leading agricultural company. This award
came with a cash bonus as well as elevated status in the local business sphere. The endorsement
that he received from the local governments at both county-level and township-level further
spurred his business growth.
Another example is telling of how the local governments adapt their governance to
accommodate agricultural e-commerce businesses. The most updated “Advertising Law” was
138
released in 2015. It specified sanctions against misleading information on products. For online
agricultural sellers, it is not uncommon to cite product information from search results on Baidu,
the largest search engine in China. This in some cases might be accused of as against as the new
law. Ming’s Taobao store was reported several times by anonymous consumers or competitors.
At first, the local Commerce Bureau was not familiar with the situation. So the officials would
command Ming to pay fines. Later on, as Ming’s business grew bigger and his connection with
the local government deepened, he would be exempted by the county- and township-level
officials. This, then, relates to the role of local bureaucracy in local development.
Under changing institutional environments, particularly fiscal decentralization, local
officials incentivize local business agents to propel local economic development (Meisner, 1996;
Oi, 1999). In the 1990s, the central government’s decollectivization and decentralization policies
“allow for far greater bottom-up input than would be predicated from its formal structures”
which “are fundamental to the PRC’s resilience and adaptability” (Heilmann and Perry, 2011,
p.8). This guerrilla policy style features “policy-making as a process of ceaseless change, tension
management, continual experimentation, and ad-hoc adjustment” (Heilmann and Perry, 2011,
p.3), and grants more power to local bureaucracy. In the rural development scheme, the local
officials have the power to privatize collective land, contract land, and approve development
projects (Meisner, 1996).
Additionally, the local officials fuel development with their power and relatively
autonomy. They spearhead moves to aim at “attracting foreign businesses and investment”
(zhaoshang yinzi 招商引资) and other forms of local agricultural and industrial development.
The objective is to boost local GDP. This general from of merging the government and economic
development results in “local state corporatism” a term coined by Oi (1999). Peter Ho et al.
139
(2004) explains “local state corporatism”:
The whole functions as a business corporation with local officials acing as the equivalent
of a board of directors or CEO. Such a relationship is one of mutual dependence, with the
local state controlling enterprises through the allocation of labour, capital and land
resources, while the enterprise in return adhere to local corporate interests and turn over
substantial portions of their revenues to the local state. (p.3)
Local bureaucrats tend to take advantage of their political status an entry into partnerships with
private businesses. The likelihood of government involved, local ties accord businesses a greater
chance of being successful than ordinary peasants. As Meisner (1996) states:
In business ventures, rural official, of course, enjoyed the advantage over ordinary
peasants, in fact a twofold advantage. First, by virtue of their political influence, they
were more likely to secure contracts and licenses and to do so on more favorable terms.
Second, once their enterprises were established, cadre-run farming and business
operations were more likely to flourish since the bureaucratic connections of their owners
game them favored access to scarce materials, markets, and bank loans. (p.313)
Meiser (1996) defines the child of the “marriage of ‘the market’ to an entrenched bureaucratic
apparatus” as a form of “bureaucratic capitalism” (p.300). The practice “refers to the use of
political power and official influence for private pecuniary gain through capitalist or quasi-
capitalist methods of economic activity” (Meisner, 1996, p.300). Similarly, Tsing (1998) found
the dominance of “bureaucratic entrepreneurs” in China’s economy, who bear both
administrative roles and managerial positions.
The affinity between political power and economic gains in rural China perhaps is more
ostensible than in urban China. This configuration grows in numbers and powers because the
140
resources for development grow more scarce in rural China. Thus, the distribution of the
available resources persist as unequal and grow ever more so.
State power and sales dollars incentivize technology development. Regarding the
agriculture sector, local bureaucrats have been the pioneers of technology promotion in rural
China. Each local agricultural bureau has a set of departments that are responsible for technology
promotion. For example, there is an agricultural technology promotion center in each county-
level agricultural bureau. At the township level, there exists agricultural technology service
centers. The officials in these centers give instructions to the peasants on how to apply new
technologies. They hold critical power in the implementation of agricultural informatization
policies. They were also capable of granting awards to companies.
My case reflects a different, alternate type of state-business relationship. Different from
local state corporatism, this type of institutional arrangement features government response to
the needs of local development. The local township government and county government worked
together to bestow on Ming--this returned-home, educated, former urban dweller--some flashy
titles to reward his business success. This echoes with the observation of Leong and her
coauthors (2016). They found that, in their two field villages, the municipal government and
other levels of institutional supporters stepped in after the local e-commerce ecosystem was
formed and took shape. This encouragement I call the “responsive state.”
The rural entrepreneurial economy actually depends upon where platforms controlled by
the major Internet companies, mainly Alibaba and Tencent extend. The delivery system that
Ming and other farmers relied on is also an element of the rapidly growing e-commerce that is
brought by and extends from these major companies. It is not only a story of a rising
businessman, but also a story of how e-commerce companies enable the rise of locals and
141
networked small farms and businesses. Besides unleashing small farmers’ initiatives, these
platforms are also setting rules that might limit the potential of growth. As mentioned above, the
strategical moves of “mere online commerce” to “new retail” might suffocate small businesses
on Taobao. Despite the ambiguous attitudes of e-commerce platforms toward small businesses,
those small farmers still view e-commerce as a necessity in expanding their businesses.
Critical to the expansion of these platforms is endorsement from the state. The state
believes in the power of these platforms in boosting the national economy. Their legitimacy is
rooted in the state’s confidence in digital technologies. In Ming’s case, what the government has
been doing is to respond to the needs from below, boost the development of a plethora of
enterprises, and then to some degree spur the enterprises on for purposes of local economic
development.
The change that occurred in my first case of Chapters 1 and 2 resembles what Everett
Rogers and Lynee Svenning (1969) defined as the “directed contact change.” Change is equated
mostly with technology dissemination as “caused by outsiders who, on their own or as
representatives of programs of planned change, seek to introduce new ideas in order to achieve
definite goals” (p. 6). In comparison, what happened in this case came imminently from the
bottom up. Changes resulted from the enabling platform environment and entrepreneurial
participation of small farmers. Commerce emerged in circumstances where platforms and social
media companies induce infrastructural transformations, including established delivery systems
and online social trust. Farmers took advantage of the platform-based digital infrastructures and
released entrepreneurial energies. The state responded to the bottom-up momentum, furthered
the expansion of agricultural networks, and fueled a platform economy. The social dimensions
142
and power relations of the resulting bottom-up political economy are the subjects of the next
chapter.
143
Chapter 5 The Networked Agriculture and Information Elites
Introduction
Chapter 4 analyzed the emergence of e-commerce, particularly social e-commerce, in a
township in southern Anhui province. It showed that the platform-based digital economy
nurtured a seedbed for the growth of “organic agricultural product” trading. The state is
responsive to, instead of spearheading, the initial take-off of the local agricultural e-commerce.
In this chapter, I discuss how this form of networked agriculture, grown out of the platform
boom and state policies, unfolds in terms of the power relations among different social groups at
the local level.
The stories of two small, local farmers who collaborated with Ming were presented in the
first section in order to extend the case of entrepreneurialism. As mentioned in Chapter 4, Ming
started with a small-scale family farm and developed his business to a successful agricultural e-
commerce company. This section describes how these two small farmers, Ming’s collaborators,
practiced business in the local agricultural e-commerce network. The next section discusses the
term of “networked agriculture.” I explain how such a networked agriculture was enabled by a
convergence of governmental facilitation, existing social ties, and business collaboration. The
third section proposes the conceptual framework by which I tackle the power relations among
different groups in this case. This section also discusses the notion of “information elites.” The
last section summarizes my argument.
1. The Local Story
Ming achieved success, even though he struggled to explore agricultural e-commerce. He
became well-known among some farmers in his hometown and adjacent villages. Poultry
144
farmers came to him for help in posting and sales; he was also approached by others to help with
selling products online. Zhai, a relative of Mr. Mei, was among them.
After driving for a paper mill for several decades, Zhai had to quit driving because he
was too old to renew his commercial driver’s license. His sons wanted him to withdraw from the
exhausting driving career. However, he was unsatisfied with the prospects of a bland post-
retirement life. He shifted to farming on a total of 20 mu land, cultivating crops as well as raising
chickens. In 2016, the number of chickens he raised was close to 500. The major market for his
chickens was the local county town.
Besides selling chickens to the local market, he also decided to sell eggs online. He asked
Ming to help. He told me, Ming “knows how to market.” They knew each other long before their
partnership took off. Zhai was Ming’s father’s cousin, and Zhai easily got to know that Ming was
doing well in agricultural e-commerce. Quite a number of the poultry farmers in neighboring
area were informed of Ming’s prosperous business. When asked if helping others to sell products
would be too much trouble, Ming said: “We are from the same place. We can sell our things at a
higher price when the market booms. If the market is tough, we can help each other. This is
mutual.”
From Zhai’s perspective, the advantage of Ming’s ability to master the Internet was one
of the key factors leading to his own business success. Zhai himself was pitifully ignorant of
Internet use. He admitted:
For Internet selling, I don’t know the Internet. I can only make calls and answer calls on
this phone, and I don’t know other things. I don’t know. (If I can) market them out, (then
I can) make money. Such as the flat peach, those people coming back from Shanghai said
145
the price was over 30 RMB per jin,
82
but my price is only 8 RMB at home. If I were
young, knowing the Internet and how to market, I could have done this business online,
deliver my products.
As a senior in his 60s, Zhai was in an astonishing position to lead on many fronts. His driving
career enabled him to be better-informed than his peers in the same village. For example, he
chose to grow the flat peach, which was a popular fruit but was scarcely found in the local areas,
because he acquired the information through acquaintances known in his driving career.
Therefore, he purchased some nursery stocks and self-taught growing techniques. The flat peach,
as he expected, would be well received.
His knowledge, however, did not translate into a digital, network information advantage.
The obstacles in his way to become technologically savvy included age and lack of experience
with smartphones. He was of his generation and faced a socially constructed atmosphere not
encouraging for older workers or laborers to adventure into new technologies.
Similar hurdles existed for Chu as well. An urban planning project took over and moved
him out of the place where he lived for many years. After resettling to his new residence, he
chose chicken raising as a means to make a livelihood. Several decades ago, when he was in the
30s, he had started his own paper making mill, amidst the paper making industry in the local area.
When his sons grew up, he transferred the ownership of the mill to them, and he himself worked
in the mill as a helper. He did not have a broad skill set, but he was willing to try new jobs. He
started chicken raising in his 60s, as a family business with his wife.
Chu raised different types of chicken breeds, including the “local” chicken ( 本鸡), hens,
black chicken, and several others which were considered very nutritious. In particular, the eggs
82
Chinese weight, 1 jin = 500g.
146
of black chicken were very popular among his customers. Their slightly green eggs were by
tradition assumed to be more nutritional than regular eggs; so, green eggs had higher economic
value. His farm was not far from the county town; at first, he would drive to the county town to
sell his products. In this way, good word of mouth about his products got spread. The number of
customers grew; people gravitated to his place for chickens or eggs.
Different from most of his peers (who also didn’t receive much education in rural areas),
Chu continued to teach himself and was passionate about writing poems and essays. As he was
good at writing essays, he wrote a quite long piece to introduce his products, printed it out, and
posted it to the wall of a house leading to his place. The poster was attention-grabbing, and the
essay very appealing--with delicate descriptions of why his chickens and eggs were nutritionally
superior.
His collaboration with Ming commenced a few years ago, when Ming was seeking
suppliers of “organic” chickens and eggs. Ming got to know Chu and purchased his products for
online sales. Ming was quite strict with quality, but he recognized that Chu’s products passed the
test. Good sales make good business partners.
Chu’s entrepreneurial spirit drove him to expand his poultry farming business. The
popularity of his products impelled this as well. However, Chu was running the business alone,
and he felt he was too old and did not possess the capability to manage business of larger scale.
He also lamented his lack of savvy with e-commerce skills. He had a cell phone, which was used
to keep in touch with family members and customers. Customers would usually make calls to
him for orders. He got an IPad, on which he could log into his WeChat account. However, he did
not use this account that often, nor did he use that IPad. He got online in 2016, when he asked
the local Internet service providers to lay fibers and connect him to the Internet. So the primary
147
way that he communicated with the outside world was through phone calls, which worked
sufficiently well for him.
Zhai and Chu, as with many seniors, were unable to get a good handle on e-commerce
skills. Even for Chu, who had relatively literary background, it was hard to translate his writing
skills to the online sphere. He was able to make a poster appealing to his customers, but his
poster could merely stay in the offline world. In comparison, Ming mastered e-commerce
techniques and produced a splashy assemblage of texts, photos, and ads for his products online.
The way in which Ming collaborated with Zhai and Chu was a new form of organizing
farming and marketing. In the next section, I will conceptualize this new form and situate it
against the changing economic backdrop.
2. Networked Agriculture
2.1 Parallels with Contract Farming
The business connections between Ming and other farmers who handed off their own
products resemble the relations between a parent agribusinesses and contract farmers. In contract
farming, smallholding farmers sign contracts with agribusinesses, specifying the number of
animals to be raised and the price.
Huang and her husband, for example, signed a contract with a company and raised 1000
chickens per cycle based on the contract. They used to be migrant workers and eventually chose
to come back to take care of their granddaughter. Their son and daughter-in-law were quite busy,
and it was a tradition for Chinese parents to take care of granddaughters and grandsons. After
they came back, they chose to work as contract farmers as this was a stable way of making
money, which reduced the risks of poultry farming. Accompanying the reduced risks was the
148
relatively sheer profits, with an income of about 10,000 RMB (approximately 1585 dollars)
every three months.
Contract farming is an established practice prevails in many places (e.g., Gatto, et al.,
2017; Pérez Niño, 2016; Zhang, 2012). The uncertainties associated with farming highlight the
importance of signing contracts that guarantee basic rewards. For Huang and similar farmers,
contract farming constituted a stable source of earning a complementary livelihood. Most
contract farming in animal husbandry produces “standardized” “industrially-produced” animals.
As the quantity of contracted animals is large and the raising time is usually compressed, the
animals are to be consumed in large quantities as “non-organic” (fei yuanshengtai 非原生态)
products.
What bonded Ming and his suppliers paralleled the ties of contract farming, in a less
formal and more ambiguous way. Some collaboration derived from Ming’s “business swing--
talent for talking-up people and social relations. Some of his suppliers were his relatives, some
were from the same place, and the others were chased after due to the quantity and quality of
their products. To put it in another way, existing social relations facilitated the buildup of this
collaboration network. The process of Ming’s seeking partners multiplied new connections
between him and other farmers.
For the relatively small scale suppliers, there was no formal contracting. Ming maintained
informal ties. Their relationship depended upon a number of factors. First, Ming was not
obligated to acquire agricultural products, so whether he would make the acquisition depended
primarily on how his business was doing. Fluctuations in Ming’s e-commerce sales stressed
cooperation with his suppliers. In addition, Ming had the discretion to evaluate his suppliers’
products; he would stop collaborating if he didn’t endorse products’ quality. Second, from the
149
suppliers’ side, the willingness of whether to raise chickens and other animals affected the
relationship. In Zhai’s case, bird flu brought about a market plunge. For a time, he ceased to raise
chickens. He thus decided to cut off collaboration for an unknown time.
2.2 Emerging Networks
It is hardly novel to point to various networks in the agricultural sector. Since the
dissolving of self-sufficient small peasant economy, agricultural practices have interconnected
into big farms’ network. Small farms, too, become involved in the networks of upstreaming and
down-streaming services and transactions. What I have found as novel here is the self-formed
relationships between those who have exclusive access to online markets and those who provide
contracted and uncontracted products. In Ming’s case, he accumulated about 60 partners, 10
among whom were of relatively large scale. It applies to other cases as well, my fieldwork in
other regions revealed this common practice: there is the emergence of a network around those
who occupied a well-established position through successful e-commerce marketing.
I describe this practice as “networked agriculture,” enabled by and render hybrid (but not
fused) combinations of virtual and real-world ties. A tie is a twined material electronic and social
relationship. The metaphor of “network” has been evoked frequently in studies about digital
communication. The most well-known descriptive term is the “network society,” developed by
Manuel Castells (2010). He discovers “a new social structure in the making,” which is the
network society as “it is made of networks in all the key dimensions of social organization and
social practice” (p. xviii). Information and communication technologies have profoundly
transformed the magnitude and nature of “networks.” My term of “networked agriculture” was
constituted by different networks, which may overlap but also be distant. This social e-commerce
based networked economy features these networks resulted from a combination of government
150
commands, existing traditional relationships, and market-driven collaborative networks. It also
echoes the “networked economy” concept, as Jarkko Vesa (2005) states:
… the term ‘networked economy’ refers to business networks, that is, networks that
represent a new kind of organizational form that has emerged as an intermediate way of
organizing between markets and hierarchies. (p. 26)
Here, in my case, the manner in which agricultural practices were organized became tempered
outside of the traditional systems, enterprises, and cultures of organizing agriculture. There was
this network centering around Ming, representing the information elites, and it expanded to
Ming’s suppliers. Information elites in the agriculture sector are those who competently
appropriate information technologies to their advantage. College educated, mastering e-
commerce tools, Ming was a self-entered member of the information elites. In contrast, the
relatively less-educated, less-media literacy farmers lagged behind the e-commerce boom; they
were pushed to a dependent supply chain position of the communication infrastructure
comprising this network. The power asymmetry was rooted in information-related skills. This
mastery of information-related skills is not directly correlated to education. Another of my
interviewees, Jiang, was not relatively educated. But he obtained enough migrant experiences
and accumulated business connections to occupy a node position of another network.
This “networked agriculture” connects not only consumers but also assemblies of other
players as well. The savvy, skilled communication entrepreneurs occupy the nodes in this
“networked agriculture.” They imagine, copy, and implement initiatives that render information
a driver in the transition role among customers, suppliers, and others (to be connected). Since ties
area informally assembled and not fused by contract, family relation or state directive, what
holds relationships together through good economic times and bad must be answered.
151
2.3 The Glue of Networked Agriculture
2.3.1 Governmental Facilitation
Besides routinized bureaucratic practice, the other side of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)
modern governance in the post-reform period is managed campaigns. As Perry (2011) argues,
the mass campaigns in the Mao era laid a foundation for the governing techniques in the post-
reform era. Although Mao’s successors tried to avoid the term of “campaign” in official
documents, the projects or initiatives they have propagated parallel Mao’s mass campaigns.
The initiative of “Constructing A New Socialist Countryside,” one of the “essential
national policies,” serves as a good example to illustrate the similarities and differences between
Maoist mass campaigns and managed campaigns (Perry, 2011). Note initially that managed
campaigns employ multiple ways of propaganda to arouse emotional responses and subjective
consciousness, characteristic of Maoist mass campaigns. Also, managed campaigns use work
team methods and train local cadres in similar ways as what Maoist mass campaigns did. Both of
these movements use experimental methods to pilot programs. Moving the people on issues
included organizing health care, cultural activities, and some other aspects of rural life.
The differences between Mao and contemporary campaign strategies are also obvious.
Managed campaigns reject an emphasis on class struggle while Maoist mass campaigns were
premised on a strict class line. Contemporary managed campaigns are more practical than Maoist
mass campaigns. Economic development becomes the driving priority in this new era.
Governance launches campaigns in iterative factions, signaling a mix of permission, command,
and promise.
In 2016, another campaign of “poverty alleviation” swept China, with the state devoting
enormous amount of budgetary and bureaucratic resources in almost every region. Civil servants
152
were enlisted to propagate policies, send aid, and provide help. Some entrepreneurs were also
involved in this campaign. The main problem area to be redressed are households under the
poverty line in the countryside. Besides proffering one-time financial and goods aids, the state
also emphasized that these households should obtain the skills that benefit them in a long run. E-
commerce was expected to be one of the tools benefiting relatively poor households (Xie and
Zhan, 2018). Ming, among these entrepreneurs, extended a helping hand to the poor households
in his hometown. As he mentioned, he gifted baby chickens, taught workers raising skills, and, if
possible, helped poultry farmers sell chickens online. This government-facilitated business
collaboration furnished a social glue that sustained the agricultural network both by encouraging
developing and publicizing values of fellow support.
Information sharing among entrepreneurs and workers differs from the market-
incentivized collaborative relationships prevailing in the flexible accumulation regime. The
government-initiated business collaboration echoes with the line of research that explores the
affinity between local bureaucracies and entrepreneurs. In this case, the affinity between these
two parties extended to local small farmers who were involved in an unprecedented way.
2.3.2 Existing Social Ties
What bonded Ming and his suppliers parallel contract farming, but social relationships
are informal, ambiguous, and non-contractual. Collaboration derived from Ming’s business
demands, based on prompt and responsive service. Some of his suppliers were his relatives,
some were from the same place, and others were brought into the fold after due consideration of
the quantity and quality of their products. To put it in another way, existing social relations
facilitated the buildup of this collaborative agricultural network.
153
For Zhang, the relation with Ming started with one mutual friend. When Ming was
looking for business partners, or suppliers, Zhang was raising quite an impressive variety of
chickens, ducks, and cattle. Ming reached out to seek produce form Zhang. And due to their trust
based upon a mutual friend, as well as the business internal drive, they started to cooperate.
Besides supplying Ming, Zhang also began to serving local and remote customers with his
WeChat function on a cell phone.
Zhang would sometimes deliver in person to his customers. Living in the mountainous
area, Zhang raised a good collection of poultry, including some special and economically
valuable breeds. He showed me around, proudly introducing these special birds. He used to be a
migrant worker, and eventually decided to come back, and invented in this poultry raising
business. Compared with other businesses, poultry farming had a lower entry threshold and was
relatively rewarding.
Meanwhile, his upbringing in the village granted him the ability to raise poultry with
some confidence. The mountain where his home was located was a naturally conducive
environment for raising poultry. Still, it was not easy. But he managed to make it. The
collaboration with Ming, undoubtedly, helped him to reach a larger market, albeit via Ming’s
website as the node.
The role of existing social relations in facilitating business collaboration has been long
noticed. As Sibin Wang (1987), Yuhua Guo (1994), and Shanhua Yang and Hongrui Hou (1999)
have noticed, the industrialization in rural China didn’t resolve traditional social ties, but actually
was impelled by the combination of business ties with traditional social ties. As Yuhua Guo
(1994) states:
154
In the process of initiating and developing new economic structures in rural China,
kinship and family relationship (qinyuanguanxi 亲缘关系) constitutes the basis of
establishing trust structures, and is tan important way to receive actual resources. Studies
with township companies and entrepreneurs have demonstrated that, qinyuanguanxi
directly or indirectly lead to the startup of an enterprise or the obtainment of capital,
information, technologies, talents, raw materials, and market. (p. 56)
The success of Ming in securing suppliers was also contingent upon traditional ties. The offline
network of the Taobao and WeChat based e-commerce network, in this case, would not be
possible without these existing social networks. From Ming’s side, his entrepreneurial efforts to
capitalize on these existing social ties to forge business collaboration constituted a key part of
success. Just as social ties offered audiences for digital messages, so conventional resources were
available to locate needed people and resources.
Some of Ming’s collaborative relationships were forged through conventional market
searching. As he got to know some people who were raising large quantities of poultry, he would
reach out to them and ask to form collaboration. With these relatively large scale partners, Ming
would sign contracts. The power relations among different players are manifested in the
networked agriculture are complicated. I develop a conceptual tool to understand what power is
and how shall we approach agrarian power dynamics in this chapter’s case of a government
encouraged and supported, corporate platformed, and socially tied rural political economy.
3. Agriculture and Power Relations
Power is multifaceted and multidimensional. Different scholars have approached and
analyzed power in varied ways (Lee, 1995). Two lenses are widely adopted in explicating power.
The first perspective, led by Marx and Weber, highlights coercive relations between two social
155
groups, although the bases of power are debated (e.g., Bernstein, 2010; Lewin, 1944, 1951; Marx,
1977; Weber, 2009). The second lens, represented by Foucault, accentuates the fluid and
pervasive nature of power (e.g., Foucault, 1988, 1995).
These two lenses were elaborated in the first chapter, so I will not reiterate them here.
Combing these two approaches to power, this project starts with the dominating role of material
bases, then incorporates Foucault’s disciplinary focus on discourses. I use material relations to
interpret power structures in the top down mode which is structurally clear and in the bottom up
case which results in ambiguous outcome of spurring local connections but also the rise of a new
elite group. Also, I analyze the controlling workings of discourses revolving around ICTs in
alternating the power flow. In this section, I develop a conceptual tool to analyze power
dynamics in networked agriculture based on my dual theoretical lenses.
The rise of e-commerce, together with other types of new media technologies, expedites
the formation and expansion of networks for all the three stages of agricultural supply chains.
There have been plenty of discussion of agricultural supply chains (e.g., Cooper and Ellram,
1993; Monczka and Morgan, 1997). As a good summary, Rhonda R. Lummus and Robert J.
Vokurka (1999) defines the supply chain as:
all the activities involved in delivering a product from raw material through to the
customer including sourcing raw materials and parts, manufacturing and assembly,
warehousing and inventory tracking, order entry and order management, distribution
across all channels, delivery to the customer, and the information systems necessary to
monitor all of these activities. (p. 11)
To clarify the several phases in the supply chain for agricultural products, I am using Jabir Ali
and Sushil Kumar’s (2011) framework: production planning (pre-production), cultivation
156
practices (production), and post-harvest management & marketing (post-production) (Figure
5.1.).
Figure 5.1. The Agricultural Supply Chain
This framework is designed to delineate how crops are planned, produced, and transacted.
In my case, I use this framework to describe the supply chain of poultry farming and other
agricultural practices. I develop a conceptual tool to explicate how information elites gained their
traction and how I approach power dynamics in the agriculture sector.
My approach the power relations in networked agriculture is inspired by Bernstein (2010)
who posed four key questions that “concern the social relations of production and reproduction”:
“Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? What do they do with it?” (pp. 22-23). The
first question asks who owns what properties. For example, whether properties are privately or
publicly owned. The second question taps into the division of labor. The third question concerns
the distribution of economic reward and other types of gains. The fourth question probes “social
relations of consumption, reproduction and accumulation” (p. 23).
Bernstein’s conceptualization dovetails with the agricultural supply chain perspective.
Combining Bernstein’s key questions, the supply chain perspective, and the discursive
157
construction of power, I highlight the following dimensions of power dynamics in networked
agriculture: pre-production decision making; the division of labor in the production stage; market
access in post-production stage; uncertainty management ability; digital visibility; and official
endorsement. I argue that, the politics of agricultural practices are revealed in these dimensions.
Figure 5.2. The Conceptual Tool for the Second Case
3.1 Pre-production Decision Making
Sound decision making about agricultural planning in the pre-production stage is key to
successes in later stages (e.g., Ali and Kumar, 2011; Smith and McDonald, 1998). In crop
agriculture, the planning on multi-cropping, alternation of crops, and so forth constitutes the
major part. In poultry farming, the number and breed of poultry, the location, and other factors
need to be taken into consideration (e.g., Prabakaran, 2003). My interviews reveal the influence
pre-production
decision making
the division of
labor in the
production stage
market access in
the post-
production stage
official endorsement
digital visibility
uncertainty management ability
158
of Ming on his suppliers. As Ming told me, for some of his business partners, he would make
orders, similar to the ordering from agribusiness to contract farmers.
When Ming and I visited some of his suppliers, we toured around for sightseeing of the
poultry. Zhang, one of Ming’s business partners, pointed to several dozens of a rarely seen breed
of ducks and told me that these ducks were ordered by Ming. Although he had his own pool of
customers and his products were popular among them, he would take lucrative orders from Ming,
particularly some special breeds which were not commonly seen in local areas.
3.2 The Division of Labor in the Production Stage
Ming’s product products feature “manual labor” and “yuanshengtai” (natural), so it is
important for him to ensure that the level of chemistry and mechanization used in the production
process is minimal. Therefore, the way in which they organize poultry farming mimics natural
raising. The first stage requires intensive human labor in ensuring the health of baby chickens.
After the baby chickens grow to a point when they can sustain themselves very well, these
poultry farmers can relax a bit on everyday managements, except for feeding them and sheltering
them at night.
When Ming first started his business, he and his parents had to attend meticulously to
every step of production. From purchasing feeds, to feeding animal, and from sheltering animals
to keeping them healthy, Ming’s family was fully engaged. The limited labor in the beginning
stage prohibited the further expansion of his poultry business. After his business got expanded,
he hired three to four people to take care of the animals, along with his father. Meanwhile, he
himself established an agricultural company and built a head office in the industrial park in the
county town. For most of the time, he commuted between the office and field. In the office, he
hired an accountant, two e-commerce specialists, and an administrative person.
159
Among his suppliers, production tasks remained the same, or even surged due to their
collaboration. The smallholding poultry farmers still conducted production without hiring wage
labor. They were the actual producers. When Ming asked some people for specific orders, he was
also contracting the labor part onto them. Large scale poultry farmers may hire wage labor. The
outsourcing of labor in the production processes becomes one of the characteristics of this
networked production.
3.3 Market Access in the Post-production Stage
Most studies on agrarian change in China more or less stay in the farming, or “production,”
arena. Chen (2015)’s article is a good example that directs our attention to the arena of
agricultural circulation. My study is aimed at analyzing the power dynamics among different
social groups across the whole supply chain of agriculture, as in this case, the networks of
agriculture participated in all the stages of the chain.
Philip Huang’s theory that the flexibility of managerial farms in hiring laborers assisted
them to outperform family farms can only partially explain the differentiation in my case. As
family farms nowadays are not the only source of livelihood for rural residents, there was not the
“involution” problem. Many rural residents have left their land for job opportunities in cities,
leaving no space for “involution” to happen.
In this case, the market access becomes the determining factor, as Forrest Zhang (2012)
noticed,
Thus, in China’s case at least, it is market access that poses the greater obstacle to family
producers’ shifting to commoditized agriculture. As a result, although the inability to
meet the requirements of skill, labor, and capital has certainly forestalled the transition to
commoditized agriculture in some rural areas, the ways through which direct producers
160
gain market access are the main dimension that creates diverging local patterns of
commoditized agriculture. (pp. 8-9).
This was the key why Ming’s agricultural business was escalated to substantially differentiate
from his suppliers. E-commerce unprecedentedly expands the market for those people who are
capable of mastering this skillset. From Ming’s side, his ability to maneuver an assemblage of
online e-commerce skills escalated him to become this large-scale agricultural enterprise. For
other people, lack of media literacy created bottlenecks for them to furthering their market size.
Zhou, who used to work in the local paper mill, opted for poultry farming as this meant
more freedom for him. When he first started raising poultry, he started with the local county
town market. He sold them in the county town and accumulated a handsome number of
customers. Meanwhile, through friends’ bridging, he got connected to some Shanghai restaurants
in need of locally raised chickens. When they asked him to send chickens, he would get chickens
cleaned up and mailed them to Shanghai. According to him, it was a quite easy and routinized
process. The major way in which he appropriated e-commerce was through social e-commerce
on WeChat. In most cases, managing a WeChat account for product selling is easier than
managing an official Taobao account. WeChat Moments function is often times used to market
the products. Agricultural Producers post the photos, not necessarily fancy ones, with certain
textual descriptions. Meanwhile, WeChat was used to communicate with their customers about
details of orders, deliveries, and so forth.
Zhou was good at communicating with his customers with WeChat. WeChat became a tool
for him to get in touch with customers as far as in Shanghai. However, for Zhou, managing
Taobao account was beyond what he could reach.
161
3.4 Flexible Accumulation and Uncertainty Management
The economic crisis in the 1970s revealed the fragility of the Fordism regime, shattering
the delicate balances prudently maintained in the post-WWII western societies. The Juggernaut
of neoliberalism overhauls economic practices, reflected in labor arrangement, supply chains,
and so forth. As A. J. Scott wrote (1988),
Unlike mass production activities which are typically rather rigid in structure, the new
forms of production are generally characterized by an ability to change process and
product configurations with great rapidity – an ability that is frequently much enhanced
by the use of computerized technologies. They are also typically situated in networks of
extremely malleable external linkages and labour market relations. By the same token,
they tend as far as possible to externalize production processes by buying in services and
products that might otherwise by supplied internally, and this sometimes leads in turn to
concomitant downsizing of individual establishments.
The flexibility that characterizes post-1970s capitalist industrial production retooled the
institutional assemblages in the capitalist world (Gülhan, 2016; Harvey, 1990). One of the mostly
discussed topics is the legitimized contract labor practice. Some companies have withdrawn from
sustaining an exclusive pool of laborers. In contrast, they summoned labor forces through
contract labor or other types of flexible laboring. The automobile industry precedes the rampant
expansion of the regime of flexible accumulation. Toyotism refers to the flexible business model
invented by Toyota, one of the leading manufacturers of automobiles. This model “includes just-
in-time production, giving greater autonomy to work teams, constant monitoring and
improvement of processes, and constant quality control, all of which are designed to reduce
waste or unnecessary effort” (Castree et al., 2013). Although most literatures on flexible
162
accumulation focus on the manufacturing sector, the concept itself applies to contemporary
agricultural practices as well. The local features of agriculture restrict the flexibility of
agricultural supply chains. Despite this, as mentioned above, contract farming emerged as a
prevailing phenomenon in some areas, with the penetratingly powerful transnational companies
(Watts, 1992). It is constructed to be a win-win situation for both small producers and
contractors. For small producers, it is said that the risks of selling products are mitigated as the
companies would purchase the products based on the stipulated contracts. For the companies, the
risks in production are mainly transferred to small farmers. The instability of farming, through
contract processes, is aggregated into a guaranteed stability for agribusiness.
New media technologies step to be important tools in capitalist regimes (Menzies, 1999).
Networks enabled by digital technologies facilitates the popularization of flexible spatialization.
As Heather Menzies (1999) states,
The networks as an increasingly integrated whole are becoming the site where business
deals are forged, where work is dispatched, and where "flexible accumulation" is both
managed and articulated through global economies of scale, scope, and speed operating in
every sector of the economy and almost any line of endeavour. (p. 541)
The most cutting-edge digital innovation furthers the frontiers of flexible accumulation. For
example, the sharing economy, predicated on mobile platforms, enables technology companies to
draw on an unprecedentedly large militia of service providers and to serve literally anyone who
is registered for the service. Uber, the largest unicorn in Silicon Valley, to some degree
resembles the flexible contract laboring practice. Uber provides customers for drivers and itself
as a platform cashes in on the aggregated “stability” of contracting or “sharing.”
“Networked agriculture,” as how I defined it in the above, overlaps with the flexible
163
accumulation regime, and is an extension of it, with an intertwinement of existing social relations
and technological advancement. In Ming’s case, the uncertainties associated with production
were largely mitigated due to dispersed production. Ming’s accumulated a network of over 60
collaborators or suppliers. In this network, the business fluctuations of an individual supplier
would not affect Ming that much. The accumulated pool of products can relatively remain stable.
3.5 Digital Visibility
Ming’s Taobao store has been established as a successful brand. For every search of a
specific product, Taobao would list some brands. Ming’s brand was among the 199 brands that
Taobao listed for “local eggs” or “organic eggs” (benjidan 本鸡蛋), which demonstrated that
Taobao highly recognized his brand. This pushes Ming’s brand to the forefront of the e-
commerce sphere of fresh and “local” agricultural products. For the Taobao website, he
presented a high-quality collection of photos and videos for his products. This collection appears
as proof of the authenticity of his products. On his WeChat moments, he shared photos and
videos of the animals and crops for the same purpose. Although Ming’s products sold online also
come from other suppliers, the reviews that appeared on Taobao website and WeChat moments
were all credited to Ming. Ming’s brand gained fame and recognition, while his suppliers were
invisible to consumers.
Meanwhile, media presence heightens his visibility. Last year, he was featured in a
program about successful young entrepreneurs produced by the official television of the
prefectural city. Through the official propaganda, he was set as a role model for the post-80 and
post-90 demographic group. The discourses constructed Ming as a successful, tech-savvy
agricultural producer.
164
3.6 Official endorsement
In the first stage of Ming’s business, he was independent in expanding businesses. As
mentioned above, he mastered the media tool to boost the visibility of his products and
accumulated a steadily growing pool of customers. After he moved the management office to the
place by the main road, his business was better known by local people, including local officials.
Starting from then, his business got more recognition by the local government, which brought-
with him policy bonuses. He was granted an award in leading local e-commerce development.
He established a company, and this company was selected by the local agricultural bureau as the
prefectural-level leading agricultural company. This award came with a cash bonus as well as
elevated status in the local business sphere.
With the state’s “poverty alleviation” campaign, he volunteered to help several
households under the poverty line to nurture their small businesses. His participation
strengthened his relationship with the local government.
His business success, together with his connections with the local government, lead to the
establishment of an agricultural e-commerce industrial park in the county town. In the
groundbreaking ceremony, a selected crew of government officials made keynote speeches and
congratulated him on his achievements. He was set as an exemplary figure in advancing the
integration of ICTs into the agriculture supply chain. The official rhetoric also endorsed his role
in encouraging more small farmers to use e-commerce for selling local agricultural products to a
broader online market. Power dynamics among and within the network surrounding Ming
connect country and city folks, products, and purchase. To make all this work, a new form of
social differentiation between Ming, representing information elites, and other agricultural
165
producers emerges. The case leads me to the conjecture or hypothesis that: An information elite
is becoming central to shaping agribusiness into the networks of rural political economy.
4. A New Form of Differentiation
4.1 Differentiation
There are different views about the class composition of the agriculture sector in
contemporary China. Huang (2012) and He (2015) think that smallholding household farming
still compose most of the agriculture sector. From their empirical investigation, smallholding
household farms are resilient in front of agribusiness. Huang, Gao, and Peng (2012) calculate the
percentage of agricultural labor employment as 3% across the nation. For them, the status of
capitalist farming can be measured by managerial households with agricultural employment. In
contrast, there are other scholars holding a different view. Based on an analysis of the different
material forms of development, Webber (2012) makes his interpretation of the social changes
occurring in rural China as capitalist. The quintessential corner stone of social change is “the
transformation of the social relations” governing production. Data showed that working relations
have been fundamentally changed since 1995, which “is the second, social, meaning of
development: the transformation of the social relations that previously governed production”
(Webber, 2012, p.7). Withdrawing from defining capitalism as a way of social organizing,
Webber (2012) defines it as “a specific way of producing goods and services” (p.9). Therefore,
Webber thinks these changes as representative of “the emergence of capitalism” (Webber, 2012,
p.7). Following this line, the rural development for him can be conceptualized as primitive
accumulation.
Hairong Yan (2015) argues “proletarization accompanies the capitalization of China’s
agriculture.” Different from Huang, she discerns the capitalist dimension of family farms and see
166
the integration of both managerial farms and family farms into the capitalist system, similar to
Bernstein’s analysis. Hairong Yan and Yiyuan Chen (2015) think that the state has been
facilitating the distinction among peasants and even eliminating small farmers.
Xinhua Sun’s (2015) case study of a township found the government’s impetus to
transform agriculture pushed the class differentiation to a new stage. Before 2007, there was
differentiation among family farms with some being the middle class and the others being the
small peasant class. However, due to the government’s enabling of land concentration and the
promotion of scale agriculture, the agribusiness became dominant. This excludes small peasants
and some middle peasants, who have to rely on wage labor to complement livelihood.
In line with the observation of the “commodification of subsistence,” Hangying Chen
(2015) found that small farmers have to directly face capitalist markets from purchasing to
selling agricultural products. He further demonstrates that capital intrudes into farming besides
circulation. Capital siphons land and labor from small farmers. It also remains that small farmers
bears the risks of farming which capital intentionally avoids. Under this circumstance, class
differentiation among farmers is getting disruptive and a more disruptive gap is forming between
capitalists and farmers.
Another assumption is that the state still tilts toward smallholding family farms, as
reflected in the collective ownership of land and some restrictions on the consolidating of land
(He, 2013). This echoes the public service claim of the state.
Going beyond a dichotomized discussion of whether China is dominated by smallholding
household farms or agribusiness, Forrest Zhang (2013) highlights regional variations in the mode
of agrarian transition. In a study of the agrarian landscape in China, Forrest Zhang discerned
“three different models of agrarian transition”, which are independent household
167
production, corporate production, and cooperative production. Local political economy and the
way in which agricultural producers’ transactions with the market are mediated.
The above-mentioned studies on agrarian change in China more or less stay in the
farming, or “production,” arena. Chen (2015)’s article is a good example that directs attention to
the arena of agricultural circulation. My study has examined the power dynamics among
different social groups across the supply chain constituting networked agriculture.
In this case, specifically, the differentiation didn’t result from the government’s
intervention, as argued by some scholars. Nor did the initial differentiation occur between
definitively agribusiness and small independent farmers. This incipient form of differentiation
emerged among small independent farmers. Ming, representing the more competent players in
the networked agriculture, started off as a small farmer. His parents and he managed a family
farm, participating in farming and transaction by themselves. At the beginning, no substantial
differences existed between Ming and the other small farmers in poultry farming in his area.
The differentiation between Ming and his suppliers grew, however. Ming’s ability to
master e-commerce skills and accumulate a large amount of customers online was key. As
Ming’s business flourished, he expanded the scale of his farm and employed wage laborers,
managers, and e-commerce specialists. He developed a network of suppliers and business
collaborators. He gained more say in pre-production decision making than his suppliers in the
same network. The division of labor tilted towards Ming as Ming himself could leave production
to the other small suppliers. He managed to control market access in post-production stage.
Market access, as discussed above, is key to the success of agricultural producers nowadays. Due
to the dispersion of production and supply chains, Ming could mitigate uncertainties in his own
agricultural enterprise. Meanwhile, he obtained both digital and official visibility and
168
endorsement. Therefore, a substantial gap divided Ming and his suppliers. This type of
differentiation emerged between information elites and those who are at peripheral positions in
this networked agriculture. I will elaborate on the term of “information elites” in the next
subsection.
4.2 Information Elites
By and large informed by modernist developmental thinking, Everett Rogers spearheaded
the diffusion of innovation studies. His early work on how agricultural innovations were diffused
in rural areas in the United States stimulated decades-long interests in innovation and innovation-
incurred social change. Communication has been understood as means towards technology-
infused social development. In this line of research, a frequently evoked concept is the
categorization of adopters in the diffusion process of innovation. The ideal types in this
categorization include innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and
laggards (Rogers, 1958, 2003). Although Rogers reminded readers not to stigmatize laggards, his
categorization and explanations of the characteristics of different categories furthered the
importance of innovation. As he commented, the differences in adopting innovation may further
the gap between elites and those with lower socio-economic status. Leong and her coauthors
(2016) argue that e-commerce enables “reconfiguration of interdependencies” and “the
emergence of grassroots leaders” (p. 479). They define “grassroots leaders” as “villagers or
grassroots organizations initiating, leading, and shaping the development of an ecosystem” (p.
479). After these leaders brought local e-commerce ecosystems into shape, more regular
villagers followed their path into e-commerce.
My investigation of the institution of agricultural informatization in this case has found
similar differences among small farmers in appropriating e-commerce, in particular e-commerce.
169
However, I am not using Rogers’ categorization, nor do I follow the normative implications in
his innovation studies. The information elites, as I define them, are those who competently
appropriate information technologies to their advantage and assume critical roles in the
networked forms of agricultural practices. Advantage comes from an agent’s ability to maneuver
information technologies. They are also discursively constructed by the state and official media
as “informationally smart.”
The major factor that elevate a person into part of information elites in this networked
agriculture is e-commerce literacy. I develop this concept based on the well-known term of
“media literacy.” I will elaborate on this in the next subsection.
4.3 E-commerce Literacy
Sonia Livingstone (2004) synthesizes media literacy as “the ability to access, analyze,
evaluate, and create messages in a variety of forms (Aufderheide, 1993; Christ & Potter, 1998)”
(p.5). This definition highlights the four components of media literacy: “access, analysis,
evaluation, and content creation” (p.5). As Livingstone (2004) emphasizes, this is a “skills-based”
approach to understanding media literacy. Corresponding to the four components of media
literacy, I develop a concept of e-commerce literacy. E-commerce literacy refers to ability to
create content, interact with customers, and deal with platforms. Ming is a good example of how
e-commerce literacy contributes the success of his business.
As a college graduate, Ming had been knowledgeable of different media tools. In the
initial stage of his family farm, he wrote diaries of his farming experience. These diaries catered
well to the mentality of urban consumers who craved for organic and green food. After
familiarizing himself with the ranking system of Baidu, he added ingredients to his diaries to
make them appear on the search page for Internet users.
170
When he started his Taobao store, he registered his own brand and created an appealing
collection of photos, videos, and text descriptions of his products. These phots, for example,
were taken with high definition cameras. The text descriptions precisely grabbed the mentality of
urban consumers. Meanwhile, the videos vividly showed the natural and green environment
where his animals lived. After he moved the head office to the county town, he hired a team of
professionals to help with creating content for consumers.
His ability in dealing with customer reviews was also very impressive. Some customers
would leave challenging comments, questioning whether his products were truly “organic.” He
selectively replied to these customers and debunked their misconceptions. He was always able to
catch the keywords and conveyed to the consumers that his products were good. He was also
able to summon up convincing explanations. Meanwhile, it was not an easy task to deal with e-
commerce platforms. He needed to negotiate with the platform about the presentation of his
products, commissions, and other management fees.
To sum up, the e-commerce literacy that Ming had was key to his business success.
Compared with Ming, most of the small farmers I interviewed lacked the ability to maneuver
such a complicated and demanding e-commerce business. Although all of my 13 interviewees
had access to the Internet via broadband, Wi-Fi, or mobile data, only 4 of them had Taobao or
WeChat accounts dedicated to selling products. Ming’s e-commerce collection was the most
sophisticated one. Although a majority of them had WeChat accounts, they mainly used WeChat
for personal communication. Even for Zhang, who also sold products on WeChat, he didn’t have
fancy presentations of his products due to insufficient photographing and editing skills.
171
5. Conclusion
The Ming case illustrates how agricultural practices become organized in a new form. This
new form differs from traditional ways of organizing agriculture. This mode of appropriating
ICTs to sell agricultural products emerged at this place where smallholding farmers were the
major producers. The established digital platforms, along with the corresponding offline
infrastructures, constituted a conducive environment for some agricultural producers to reach a
larger market of urban consumers who are willing to overpay for authentic “organic” agricultural
products. Those who are competent in e-commerce, particularly social e-commerce, have
enjoyed a higher probability for business success. I describe them as the “information elites,”
who competently appropriate information technologies to their advantage. They conform to the
rules set by major e-commerce and social networking platforms. The key factor to their success
is e-commerce literacy, which I define as ability to create content, interact with customers, and
deal with platforms. Although they are not free from platforms’ rules and changes, they are in a
better position than most small farmers in agricultural networks.
The political economics of rural China appear to develop around ties among the state,
media companies, and localized information elites. I describe this practice as “networked
agriculture,” enabled by the combination of virtual and real-world ties. A tie is a twined material
electronic and social relationship. Compared with them, the relatively less-educated farmers
lagged behind in this e-commerce swirl, spun to the peripheral positions in this network. The
power asymmetry now has dimensions in information-related, electronic connection skills.
The differentiation among small farmers in this case didn’t result from the government’s
intervention, as argued by some scholars. Nor did the initial differentiation occur between
definitively agribusiness and small independent farmers. This incipient form of differentiation
172
emerged among small independent farmers and grew to a substantial differentiation with a
growing gap between information elites and those who are at peripheral positions in this
networked agriculture. This differentiation originated in the platform economy and grew in
interaction with existing social ties. Those who can take better advantage of platform rules and
cater to platform needs are more likely to succeed.
173
Chapter 6: Conclusion
This dissertation results from my attempts to understand aspects of the political economy
of ICTs-centered social projects and the social impact of such projects by inquiry into the
agricultural sector in China. I am intrigued by the ways in which ICTs are developed into
different arenas in social life. From a political economic view, the contemporary market forces
and state power, together with social factors, shape ICTs-center social projects. I developed a
strategy of inquiry into the processes of emerging communication infrastructures. This study
seeks to go beyond standing political economic theories. I attempt to find how these alternatively
shaped networked social projects affect different social groups and to track the relationships
among them. My curiosity resulted in a study of agricultural informatization.
I chose agriculture as my site of investigation because, the application of ICTs in the
agriculture sector in China is being implemented in various ways before being sufficiently
studied. The state puts emphasis on restructuring agriculture with advanced ICTs, such as the
Internet of Things, Big Data, and e-commerce. Academic studies are sparse. In particular, there
is little attention accorded to how applications of ICTs could affect agricultural stakeholders. The
study is undertaken in the context of debates over whether agribusiness or smallholding farmers
should be objects of state support and developments. Students of China rural studies hold
contrasting views. However, few of them take informztization as a factor in shaping local power
dynamics. Based on a convergence of my research interests and the need to address literature
gaps, I decided to explore agricultural informatization. The contexts of rural development were
read against information I gathered through on the ground inquiry. The dialectic was shaped into
174
explorations of agency, power relations, and political economy in contrasting modes of
developing communication infrastructures, from the top down and from the bottom up.
This study looks at two modes of agricultural informatization that I observed in the field.
In each of these two cases, specific political economic conditions result in a specific mode of
agricultural informatization, which in turn generates a specific arrangement of power structures
and social change. The second and third chapter discuss the first mode. In this mode, agricultural
informatization unfolds as a top down IoT project initiated by both the state and an agricultural
technology company. The IoT in agriculture mainly consists of the following technologies: crop
growth management system, data collection systems, data analysis systems, and data
management systems. The fourth and fifth chapter focus on the second mode. This second case is
a bottom up mode in which small farmers participate in social e-commerce within a platform
economy. The predominance of social e-commerce platforms, such as Taobao and WeChat e-
commerce, facilitate building infrastructures by nurturing the participation of small farmer in
developing and expanding networks.
These two mode are but two examples along the spectrum of agricultural informatization.
Given the multiplicity of agricultural practices and of ICTs, there are likely a range of
agricultural informatization modes. However, I think, inductively speaking, these two modes are
exemplary of how agricultural producers appropriate ICTs in rural China.
The study examines the impacts of informatization from a sociological orientation that
pursues ties among structure, agency, and technology. Social structures shape technology uses,
while at the same time technology uses enable and trigger social change. Therefore, I analyze
how agricultural informatization becomes institutionalized in different ways, focusing on two
different rural China locations. There I investigate how agricultural informatization develops and
175
in turn affects social structures. In this way, the structural view of technologies is complemented
by social change enabled by technologies, and the agentic potential of social actors. I work from
the hypothesis that the application of agricultural informatization is not a static process
composed of linear stages. Rather, technology uses and structural change are always dynamic,
experiencing restless transformations.
In this chapter, I summarize my findings; then, I discuss the contributions of my study,
with a dialogue concerning communication infrastructures and rural China studies. In the last
section, I reflect on methodology, discuss its limits, and point to future research horizons.
1. Research Findings
1.1 Chapter Outline
The first chapter sets out the argument of the dissertation project. I situate my inquiry in
the context of electronic communication infrastructures, messages, and purchasing entangled
with our work and living. The chapter introduces concerns about the rural areas of China.
Debates over proposed courses of development are discussed. The existence and desirability of
small versus large farm dominance is presented as a key controversy. The concept of
informatization was introduced as the core feature of study, pursuing how large farms and small
farms adapted to network technologies and platforms. I laid out the strategy of case study as a
dialectical reading that matches an introduction to general context and local cases. I developed
two models or modes of agricultural networking (material and electronic entwining) as
illustrative of the spectrum of information relations to agriculture.
The second and third chapters focus on the first agricultural informatization mode, the
top-town state and ag tech company-led mode. The second chapter delineates how social,
political, cultural, and economic factors shape the state-initiated project of agricultural
176
informatization. Through analyzing government policies and documenting the ascendency of
agricultural technology companies, I showed that The Internet of Things (IoT) hype became
installed by the local state and ag tech companies. The IoT market, correspondingly, was
developed and expanded by these two stakeholders. The business of agricultural technology
companies is framed as advancing the public interests in automating and greening the agriculture
sector. The unfolding of agricultural informatization in my first case materialized the global
digital order at the local level. In this process, other stakeholders, particularly the small farmers,
were marginalized.
The third chapter examines agricultural informatization as a top down mode of making
connections and rendering disconnections. I argue that, the ways hyping the system generates
expectations that engender a localized digital hegemony. On the one hand, this hegemony
manifests itself as an electronic hegemonic labor control regime in the agricultural technology
company’s farm. The IoT system was elevated through the strategy of speculative realism to a
superior status, as compared with human labor. Consent about the superiority of the IoT system
was constantly created in those grape orchards. On the other hand, the localized digital
hegemony is manifested as the power of the ag-tech company over local farmers and agricultural
businesses. Through connecting some objects and disconnecting other objects, the IoT system
fabricates agriculture into a spectacle with social consequences. In addition, through constructing
agricultural technology companies as technologically advanced and small farmers as the laggards,
the discursive sphere places different players at different positions in the local power structure.
This localized digital hegemony is manufactured through legitimizing digital technologies, and
more importantly, legitimizing the centralized, capitalist ownership of digital technologies.
The fourth chapter explains the way in which small farmers appropriate technologies
177
from their side and how the state responds to such grassroots activities. With the increasing
demand for green food and the popularizing of e-commerce platforms, local information elites
have harnessed the benefits of e-commerce and built their deep connections with the urban
market. They have gradually become the hub between other farmers and online networks. The e-
commerce platforms and social networking services established facilitating offline
infrastructures. Instead of spearheading the e-commerce swoon, the local state is responsive to
the grassroots energy emerging within a platform-based digital economy.
The fifth chapter illuminates the advent of networked agriculture and the differentiation
among small farmers. Within the well-established online and offline infrastructures, some small
farmers can reach a larger market than ever before. There emerges a new way of organizing
farming, enabled by ICT-infused regimes of flexible accumulation. These agricultural networks
are formed by a convergence of business momentum, government support, and existing social
relations. Those with a high level of e-commerce literacy have become the nodes in networks,
whom I define as information elites. Information elites in this case master the rules and strategies
set by e-commerce and social networking platforms, exemplified by Taobao and WeChat. The
incipient form of differentiation emerged among small independent farmers and grew to a
substantial differentiation. There was a growing gap between information elites and those who
are at peripheral positions in this networked agriculture.
1.2 Discussion
The two modes that I discussed both result in further differentiation among stakeholders
in the local agriculture sector. In the first case, the centralized ownership of the IoT system by
the agricultural technology company, along with the hype created around the IoT, marginalizes
small farmers. In the second case, although e-commerce tools are accessible to virtually anyone,
178
its platform-centered interests and demands for ever-developing skills benefit information elites
more than regular small farmers. These outcomes do not necessarily imply that the use of
technologies inevitably reinforces social discrepancy or results in new forms of social
differentiation.
As my research shows, different ways of applying and appropriating ICTs impact the
local power structure profoundly. Outcomes vary; pitfalls remain—for any and all capital-driven
formations of technological institutions and communicative infrastructures. I do conceptualize
the two modes of informatization into seemingly opposite models: The top-down strategy and
the bottom-up strategy, however, do share similarities. The first mode represents the prevailing
state-corporate alliance in fostering new technologies for economic development. The state
spearheads agricultural restructuring by anchoring hopes and rendering speculative real a
movement to the future of agricultural builds up and on the IoT. The second mode can be found
in areas where platform oligopolies direct economic development through attracting and
enabling the participation of small farmers. These small farmers become dependent upon e-
commerce platforms.
These two modes unfold in a digital landscape where government preferred, private,
corporate interests drive economic interests and frame developmental schemas. In the first case,
the local governments prefer corporate interests and legitimize ag tech companies-initiated
technological practices. In contrast, the informatization schema excludes small farmers, leading
to the marginalization of these small farmers. In the second case, national economic restructuring
prioritizes platform interests, exemplified by e-commerce platforms. Following this line, those
who could productively appropriate platform rules can outperform those who are unable to
master the rules. There emerges the cleavage among local small farmers. Thus, I witness new
179
forms of inequality in both cases. Or, to put it in a more dialectical way, new forms of
antagonism among different stakeholders rise along the lines of ICTs. The hegemonic forces and
counter-hegemonic forces spiral around technologies.
2. Implications and Contributions
This project contributes to four areas of research. First, it interrogates the “social shaping
of technology” in the rural China context, with a comparative perspective of how different
political economic conditions shape agricultural informatization modes. It speaks to the broader
concept of socio-technical communicative infrastructures. These entanglements of digital and
analog exchange consist of practices and technologies that respond to both local conditions and
global connections.
I approach agricultural supply chains as a kind of socio-technical communicative
infrastructures. From a transmission point of view of communication (Carey, 1989), agricultural
supply chains involve the exchange and flow of information in multiple dimensions during
different stages of agricultural practices. Generally speaking, information flows between objects
and producers, producers and retailers, regular producers and agribusiness, agricultural
practitioners and the market. In both of my cases, ICTs are appropriated in different ways and
become integral to conventional agricultural supply chains. These technological tools
revolutionized the way in which objects are connected to human beings and human beings are
connected with each other. In the first mode, the application of the IoT in vineyards transforms
the information flow between grapes and producers and that between technology providers and
technology recipients. In the second mode, e-commerce platforms and social networking
applications change the organizational form among local agricultural producers. ICTs-engaged
agricultural supply chains thus become digitally communicative. The institutionalized structures
180
of information transmission generate new relationships of cooperation, dependency, and
contention. On the other hand, from a ritual point of view (Carey, 1989), agricultural supply
chains constitute the nexus of communities in and outside the agriculture sector. These
communities are susceptible to structural forces, including policy change, rural-urban exchanges,
economic fluctuations. Within the communities, power dynamics are in constant change. My
inquiry offers a look into how communication is practiced in the agriculture sector. Therefore,
through a study on agricultural informatization, I claim that my case study provides a starting
point for a general inquiry into socio-technical communicative infrastructures in multiple locales.
Second, this study adds to empirical studies on the social impact of informatization or
ICTs in specific areas. I examined the political economic forces that shape technology usage. I
argue that if we want to know the social consequences of technologies, we need first to know
how these technologies surface and become institutionalized. Then I complement the political
economy approach with a local level analysis of how technology use affects the relations among
different social groups. Going beyond research on inequality in technology access and usage, this
study grounds my concerns with inequality issues in social settings of everyday living. It
documents how technology access and usage gets materialized in its consequences. An
explanation of how structural forces interact with technology usage is presented in order to map
specific social change.
Third, this inquiry examines the most recent transformation in the relations among
different social groups in rural China. It extends the well-known farmer-agribusiness dichotomy
and documents the entry of new social actors. Inquiry updates our understanding of rural power
dynamics in the digital age. I documented the role of agricultural technology companies, local
bureaucrats, e-commerce platform companies, and a new group of information elites in the
181
agriculture sector. Agricultural practices unfold in increasingly close urban-rural connections and
global-local exchanges.
Fourth, this project provides valuable empirical cases for policy-making in restructuring
the agriculture sector in the global south. Normatively speaking, my focus on power asymmetry
will inform policy makers of what needs to be taken into consideration for the benefits of
disadvantaged groups. I am not only concerned with the overall, mainstream development
language, but also emphasize the differing level of benefits for different social groups. Designing
informatization projects for agricultural development necessitates empirical evidence. My
research, together with some other studies, reveals the pitfalls of top-town projects. Similarly, the
bottom-up informatization practices in my case, against the backdrop of a platform economy, are
associated with pitfalls as well. My study refines and goes beyond the policy question of whether
ICTs can empower agricultural producers. Nor does it merely ask whether technology usage
contributes to economic development. I am concerned with who benefit more than the others.
The way in which ICTs can contribute to the empowerment of farmers varies due to the
intersection of political institutionalization and market structures. How to tackle these pitfalls
and tap in ICTs for equal empowerment is key to the well-being of rural residents.
3. Methods Reflection, Limitations, and Future Research Directions
For the first part of my study, I looked at government documents from the state council,
the Ministry of Agriculture, and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to map out
policies on this mode. I uncovered whose interests are attended in the formation of these policies
by textual analysis. I asked why certain options are constructed, what else could have happened,
and why the project of agricultural informatization appeared as it did in public representation. I
conducted textual analysis to explicate government documents and media reports.
182
For the impact part of my study, I conducted in-depth interviews with local bureaucrats,
employees in Internet companies and agricultural technology companies, local small farmers and
agribusiness. I approached local agriculture bureaus and interviewed the bureaucrats in charge of
informatization initiatives. I interviewed the township-level agricultural bureaucrats who directly
contact with local agricultural producers. I also chatted with a few employees from Internet
companies and agricultural technology companies who provide information equipment and
content services to local agricultural producers. Fourth, I conducted interviews with local
agricultural producers, small farmers and agribusiness, about their perception and experience in
an increasingly informatized circumstance.
This inductive research method has limitations. As I revealed in the opening section of
this chapter, I construct the two modes from my fieldwork by extrapolating from field work
observations. I do offer these two modes as exemplary of how ICTs are appropriated in the
agriculture sector in rural China. The political economic forces that shape these two modes can
be found in similar locales.
Of course, there are likely other modes of agricultural informatization to be discovered,
given the multiplicity of agricultural practices and of technologies. Additional market, power,
network features are in the process of developing. Unexpected mixes may even turn some assets
into pitfalls and the reverse. This project hasn’t exhausted agricultural information modes in
China. For example, there may be cases where smallholding farmers adopt technologies in a
more egalitarian way in which everyone appropriates technologies collaboratively, in contrast to
my second model where power asymmetry was ostensible. There may also be cases where Non-
governmental organizations direct technological appropriation for public goods. These variants
will be explored in my future research on agriculture.
183
Despite the limitations, the conceptual scaffolds developed in this project should remain
useful to future research. Agrarian transition of rural areas across different geographical regions
requires local knowledge studies. My study provides a starting point for a general inquiry into
socio-technical communicative infrastructures in multiple, rural locales. Through collecting more
on-site evidence, I intend to develop an adjacency model of agricultural communicative
infrastructures. This adjacency model examines communicative infrastructures that share
similarities but are distinctive from each other. It provides a possibility of inductive critique of
social structures through interrogating the power dynamics among the stakeholders. In this
model, there are not only top-down or bottom-up modes. Mediating modes exist and generate a
more complicated picture of how communicative infrastructures interact with local political
economies. Specifically, I will look at who initiates technology innovation and appropriation and
what types of technologies are in use.
Meanwhile, the differences and similarities between the IoT in cities and rural area
should become an important field. My study raises questions relevant to designing smart city
initiatives, what are the political economic forces? How would these initiatives affect different
groups of urban residents? Whose interests are advanced? Which groups are left behind? These
questions are key to understanding social projects centering around ICTs more generally.
To sum up, this dissertation traces how the socially shaped projects of agricultural
informatization impact the power structures among different stakeholders at the local level. In
each of my two cases, I observed that specific political economic conditions result in a
distinctive mode of agricultural informatization, which in turn generates an identifiable type of
power structure and social change. In both cases, new forms of antagonism among different
stakeholders emerged. ICTs and agricultural informatization projects do not merely exist as
184
neutral tools for local development. They are constructed by political economic forces and exert
influence on agrarian power dynamics in unprecedented ways. The Internet of Things for rural
areas and the agricultural sector may well contribute in the future to the informatization of the
cities, as urban residents will always depend on the regions of farming areas and its supply
chains of substance.
185
References
Ahuja, U. R., Jain, R., Chauhan, S., Amarjit, P., Narayan, K. R., & Chaudhry, K. R. (2015).
Socio-economic impact of mobile phone in agriculture: A case study of Karnal district. In
Computing for Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom), 2015 2nd International
Conference on (pp. 1176–1179). Bharati Vidyapeeth, New Delhi.
Ali, J., & Kumar, S. (2011). Information and communication technologies (ICTs) and farmers’
decision-making across the agricultural supply chain. International Journal of
Information Management, 31(2), 149–159.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2010.07.008
Allen, A. (2013). The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary
Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Altheide, D. (1984). Media hegemony: a failure of perspective. Public Opinion Quarterly, 48(2),
476–490. https://doi.org/10.1086/268844
Aronson, S. H. (1971). The Sociology of the Telephone. International Journal of Comparative
Sociology, 12(3), 153–167. https://doi.org/10.1163/156854271X00119
Baudrillard, J., & Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations. New York City, N.Y., U.S.A.:
Semiotext(e).
Bell, D. (2008). The Coming of Post-industrial Society. Basic Books.
Bernstein, H. (2010). Class dynamics of Agrarian change. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press.
Bernstein, H. (2014). Food sovereignty via the “peasant way”: a sceptical view. The Journal of
Peasant Studies, 41(6), 1031–1063. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.852082
Bin, Q., Chen, S.-J., & Sun, S. Q. (2003). Cultural Differences in E-Commerce: A Comparison
186
between the U.S. and China. Journal of Global Information Management (JGIM), 11(2),
48–55. https://doi.org/10.4018/jgim.2003040103
Bo, Y. (1991). Revisiting Major Policies and Incidents (Ruogan zhongda juece yu shijian de
huigu 若干重大决策与事件的回顾). Central Party School of the Communist Party of
China Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice / Pierre Bourdieu; translated by Richard Nice.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Braverman, H. (1975). Labor and monopoly capital; the degradation of work in the twentieth
century. Foreword by Paul M. Sweezy. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Burawoy, M. (1985). The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and
Socialism. London: New York, N.Y: Routledge.
Carroll, W., & Ratner, R. (1996). Master frames and counter-hegemony: political sensibilities in
contemporary social movements. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 34(4),
407–435.
Castells, M. (2010). The rise of the network society [electronic resource] (2nd ed., with a new
pref). Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Castree, N., Kitchin, R., & Rogers, A. (2013). Toyotism. A Dictionary of Human Geography, A
Dictionary of Human Geography.
Carey, J. (1989). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society / James W. Carey.
(Media and popular culture; 1). Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Chan, A., Madsen, R., & Unger, J. (2009). Chen village: Revolution to globalization. Univ of
California Press.Chapman, R., & Slaymaker, T. (2002). ICTs and rural development:
review of the literature, current interventions and opportunities for action.
187
Chayanov, A. V. (1989). The peasant economy: Collected works. Ekonomika, Moscow.
Chen, Hangying. The rise of new agricultural entities and a rethinking of the situation of
“peasant economy” – using Hezhen in southern Anhui as an example. (Xinxing nongye
zhuti de xinqing yu “xiaonong jingji” chujing de zaisikao – yi wannan hezhen weili 新型
农业主体的兴起与“ 小农经济” 处境的再思考——以皖南河镇为例). Open Times, 5.
Chun, L. (2013). China and Global Capitalism: Reflections on Marxism, History, and
Contemporary Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Compaine, B. M. (2001). The digital divide: facing a crisis or creating a myth? Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Cooper, M. C., & Ellram, L. M. (1993). Characteristics of Supply Chain Management and the
Implications for Purchasing and Logistics Strategy. The International Journal of
Logistics Management, 4(2), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1108/09574099310804957
Cronon, W. (1992). Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (Reprint edition). New
York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Cui, Z. (1998). “Mixed Constitution” and a three-layered analysis of Chinese politics (“Hunhe
xianfa” yu dui zhongguo zhengzhi de sanceng fenxi “ 混合宪法” 与对中国政治的三层
分析). Strategies and Management, 3, 60-65.
Cunliffe, A. L. & Luhman, J. (2013). SAGE key concepts: Key concepts in organization theory.
London, UK: Sage UK. Retrieved from
https://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/sageuk
ot/labor_process_theory/0?institutionId=887
daCosta, F. author. (2013). Rethinking the Internet of Things [electronic resource]: A Scalable
Approach to Connecting Everything / by Francis daCosta. Berkeley, CA: Apress.
188
Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. London; New York: Verso.
De Silva, H, and Ratnadiwakara, D (2009). Using ICT to reduce transaction costs in agriculture
through better communication: A case study from Sri Lanka. LIRNEasia. Colombo.
Available from http://www.lirneasia.net.
Dijck, J. van. (2013). The culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media / José van
Dijck. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ding, F. (2005). County-level agricultural propagation centers are obligated to help farmers (wei
nongmin “chuanjingsongbao” shi xianji nongji tuiguangzhongxin de tianzhi 为农民“ 传
经送宝” 是县级农技推广中心的天职). Agricultural Economy, 4(2005), 44-44.
Feldman, S., & Welsh, R. (1995). Feminist Knowledge Claims, Local Knowledge, and Gender
Divisions of Agricultural Labor: Constructing a Successor Science 1. Rural Sociology,
60(1), 23–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.1995.tb00561.x
Flor, A. G. (1993). The informatization of agriculture. Asian Journal of Communication, 3(2),
94–103.
Forrest, Q. (2012). The Political Economy of Contract Farming in China’s Agrarian Transition
(Report). Journal of Agrarian Change, (4).
Fortner, R S. "Media Ethics as Panoptic Discourse: A Foucauldian View." In Handbooks in
Communication and Media, 364-75. Oxford, UK: Wiley-‐Blackwell, 2011.
Foucault, M. (1988). The history of sexuality / by Michel Foucault ; translated from the French
by Robert Hurley. (1st Vintage Books ed.). New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison / Michel Foucault ; translated
from the French by Alan Sheridan. (2nd Vintage Books ed.). New York: Vintage Books.
Fox, N. (1998). Foucault, Foucauldians and sociology. British Journal of Sociology, 49(3), 415–
189
433. https://doi.org/10.2307/591391
Gatto, M., Wollni, M., Asnawi, R., & Qaim, M. (2017). Oil Palm Boom, Contract Farming, and
Rural Economic Development: Village-Level Evidence from Indonesia. World
Development, 95, 127–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.02.013
Glover, D., & Kusterer, K. C. (1990). Small farmers, big business - contract farming and rural
development.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and
translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. ([1st ed.]). New York:
International Publishers.
Greengard, S. (2015). The internet of things / Samuel Greengard. [electronic resource].
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015, Distribution info: Piscataqay, New Jersey.
Goldman Sachs. China E+Commerce, shopping re-Imagined (2017). Equity Research, February
28.
GRAIN — Asia’s agrarian reform in reverse: laws taking land out of small farmers’ hands. (n.d.).
Retrieved April 27, 2016, from https://www.grain.org/article/entries/5195-asia-s-
agrarian-reform-in-reverse-laws-taking-land-out-of-small-farmers-hands
Gu, Wen, & Huang, Liping. “Agricultural e-commerce taking off” (Nongchanpin dianzishangwu
xushi daifa 农产品电子商务蓄势待发) E-commerce ( 《电子商务》) 2005(4): 69–71.
Sinan Gülhan. (2016). The Dialectics of Post-Modern Urbanism: Allegory, History, Memory,
and Flexible Accumulation. Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences, 15(4),
1017-1028.
Guo, H., Jolly, R. W., & Zhu, J. (2007). Contract Farming in China: Perspectives of Farm
Households and Agribusiness Firms. Comparative Economic Studies, 49(2), 285–312.
190
https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ces.8100202
Guo, Y. (1994). Traditional family and kinship relations in rural modernization. Sociological
Studies 6: 49–58.
Haboudane, D., Miller, J. R., Tremblay, N., Zarco-Tejada, P. J., & Dextraze, L. (2002).
Integrated narrow-band vegetation indices for prediction of crop chlorophyll content for
application to precision agriculture. Remote Sensing of Environment, 81(2), 416–426.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0034-4257(02)00018-4
Hai, W. (1997). A Study of China’s Township and Village Enterprises. Beijing: China Industry
and Commerce Associated Press.
Harman, G. (2012). The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary
Criticism. New Literary History,43(2), 183-203.
Hart-Landsberg, M. (2013). Capitalist globalization: consequences, resistance, and alternatives /
by Martin Hart-Landsberg. New York: Monthly Review.
Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural
change. Oxford [England]; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
Harvey, D. (1990). Flexible Accumulation Through Urbanization, Reflections on "Post-
Modernism" in the American City. Perspecta, 26, 251.
He, X. The Perspective from Small Farmers (xiaonong lichang 小农立场). Beijing: China
University of Political Science and Law Press. 2013.
Heeks, R. (2010). Do information and communication technologies (ICTs) contribute to
development? Journal of International Development, 22(5), 625–640.
http://doi.org/10.1002/jid.1716
191
Heilmann, S., & Perry, E. J. (2011). Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla policy style and adaptive
governance in China. Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive
Governance in China, 1–29.
Held, D. (1999). Global transformations: politics, economics and culture / David Held ... [et al.].
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Hong, Y. (n.d.). UI Press | Yu Hong | Networking China: The Digital Transformation of the
Chinese Economy. Retrieved November 11, 2016, from
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/78hhc2pr9780252040917.html
Hsing, Y. (1998). Making capitalism in China: the Taiwan connection / You-tien Hsing. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Huang, P. C. (1990). The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-
1988. Stanford University Press.
Huang, Y. (2008). Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. Cambridge University Press.
Retrieved from http://econpapers.repec.org/bookchap/cupcbooks/9780521898102.htm
Huang, P. (2012). Unequal transaction between smallholding producers and capital: The
characteristics of China’s modern agriculture. Open Times, 3, 88-99.
Huang, P. (2013). Whither rural china: capitalism, socialism, or? Rural China, 10, 1-4.
Huang, P, and Peng, Y. (2007). The conjunction of three historical trends and the prospect of
small-scale farming in China (Sanda lishixing bianqian de jiaohui yu zhongguo
xiaoguimo nongye de qianjing 三大历史性变迁的交汇与中国小规模农业的前景).
Social Sciences in China (Zhongguo shehui kexue 中国社会科学) No. 4, pp. 74-88.
192
Huang Philip C. C., Gao Yuan, Peng Yusheng (2012) “Capitalization without proletarianization
in China’s agricultural development.” Modern China 38, 2 (Mar.): 139–73. Google
Scholar Link
Hudson, H. E. (1984). When telephones reach the village: the role of telecommunications in
rural development / Heather E. Hudson. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex PubCorp.
Hung, H. F. (Ed.). (2009). China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism. Baltimore, MD:
John Hopkins University Press.
Islam, M. S. (2011). Creating opportunity by connecting the unconnected: mobile phone based
agriculture market information service for farmers in Bangladesh. Retrieved from
http://oru.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:440147/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Jensen, R. (2007). The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and
Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector. The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
122(3), 879–924.
Jin, T. (2002). The Political-Sociological Analysis of the Threefold Power Interaction in the
Governance of the Village (Cunzhuang zhilizhong sanchong quanli hudong de
zhengzhishehuixue fenxi 村庄治理中三重权力互动的政治社会学分析). Strategies and
Management, 2, 105-114.
Jing, S., & Luo, L. (1978). Landlord and Labor in Late Imperial China: Case Studies from
Shandong. Harvard Univ Asia Center.
Kellner, D. (2003). Media spectacle / Douglas Kellner. London; New York: Routledge.
Kloppenburg, J. (1991). Social Theory and the De/Reconstruction of Agricultural Science: Local
Knowledge for an Alternative Agriculture 1. Rural Sociology, 56(4), 519–548.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.1991.tb00445.x
193
Kshetri, N. (2017). The evolution of the internet of things industry and market in China: An
interplay of institutions, demands and supply. Telecommunications Policy, 41(1), 49–67.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2016.11.002
Kumar, R., & Best, M. L. (2007). Social Impact and Diffusion of Telecenter Use: A Study from
the Sustainable Access in Rural India Project. The Journal of Community Informatics,
2(3). Retrieved from http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/328
Lee, C. (1995). Engendering the Worlds of Labor: Women Workers, Labor Markets, and
Production Politics in the South China Economic Miracle. American Sociological Review,
60(3), 378–397. https://doi.org/10.2307/2096420
Lee, K.-P. (1995, January 1). Foucault, Marx and the question of politics: The materialist
problematics of power. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Retrieved from
http://search.proquest.com/docview/304200743/?pq-origsite=primo
Lenin, V. I. (1956). The development of capitalism in Russia; the process of the formation of a
home market for large-scale industry. Moscow, Foreign Languages Pub. House.
Leong, C., Pan, S., Newell, S., & Cui, L. (2016). The Emergence of Self-Organizing E-
Commerce Ecosystems in Remote Villages of China: A Tale of Digital Empowerment for
Rural Development. MIS Quarterly, 40(2), 475-484.
Lewin, K., Cartwright, D., University of Michigan. Research Center for Group Dynamics, &
Lewin, K. (n.d.). Field theory in social science; selected theoretical papers. Edited by
Dorwin Cartwright (1st ed). New York, Harper [c1951.
Leye, V. (2009). Information and Communication Technologies for Development: A Critical
Perspective. Global Governance, 15(1), 29–35.
Li, A. (2017). E-commerce and Taobao Villages: A Promise for China's Rural
194
Development? China Perspectives, (3), 57-62.
Li, H. (2009). Village China under socialism and reform: a micro history, 1948-2008. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Livingstone, S. (2004). Media Literacy and the Challenge of New Information and
Communication Technologies. The Communication Review, 7(1), 3–14.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10714420490280152
Logan, Michael, Luk, S. & Hui, Y.M. (2004). Old ways slow path to e-commerce; China’s
online retailers face obstacles. South China Morning Post, 3 August, p. 1.
Lummus, R. R., & Vokurka, R. J. (1999). Defining supply chain management: a historical
perspective and practical guidelines. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 99(1), 11-
17.
Lustig, N. F. (2014). Rereading Foucault on Technology,Variegation, and Contemporary Power,
248.
Lv, X. (2010). Neo-Localism or urban slams? Open Times, 4, 115-135.
Ma, J. X., Buhalis, D., & Song, H. (2003). ICTs and Internet adoption in China’s tourism
industry. International Journal of Information Management, 23(6), 451–467.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2003.09.002
Mahmood, K. (2005). Multipurpose community telecenters for rural development in Pakistan.
The Electronic Library, 23(2), 204–220. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470510592906
Makinen, J. (2016, April 03). Rural China seen as fertile ground for e-commerce; as tech giant
Alibaba taps into a new market of online shoppers, Beijing hopes for an economic
infusion. Los Angeles Times, p. A1.
Mann, S. A., & Dickinson, J. M. (1978). Obstacles to the development of a capitalist agriculture.
195
The Journal of Peasant Studies, 5(4), 466–481.
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066157808438058
Marsden, T. (2000). Food Matters and the Matter of Food: Towards a New Food Governance?
Sociologia Ruralis, 40(1), 20–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9523.00129
Martinsons, M. G. (2008). Relationship-‐based e-‐commerce: theory and evidence from China.
Information Systems Journal, 18(4), 331–356. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-
2575.2008.00302.xMarx, K., Fowkes, B., & Marx, K. (1977). Capital: a critique of
political economy. New York: Vintage Books.
Martinsons, M. G. (2008). Relationship-based e-commerce: theory and evidence from China.
Information Systems Journal, 18(4), 331–356. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-
2575.2008.00302.x
Marx, K. (1975). Marx, Engels: selected correspondence / translated by I. Lasker ; edited by S.W.
Ryazanskaya. (3d rev. ed.). Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Masuda, Y. (1980). The Information Society as Post-industrial Society. World Future Society.
Matinova, Polina. This is only the beginning for China’s explosive e-commerce growth. Fortune,
December 5, 2017. Accessed from http://fortune.com/2017/12/04/china-ecommerce-
growth/.
McChesney, R. (2013). Digital disconnect : How capitalism is turning the Internet against
democracy. New York: The New Press.
Mckay, S. (2007). Filipino Sea Men: Constructing Masculinities in an Ethnic Labour Niche.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33(4), 617–633.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13691830701265461
McMichael, P. (2000). ‘‘The power of food.’’ Agriculture and Human Values 17: 21–33.
196
Meisner, M. J. (1996). The Deng Xiaoping era: an inquiry into the fate of Chinese socialism,
1978-1994 / Maurice Meisner. (1st ed.). New York: Hill and Wang.
Menzies, H. (1999). Digital networks: The medium of globalization and the message. Canadian
Journal of Communication, 24(4), 539.
Merton, R. (1948). The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. The Antioch Review, 8(2), 193-210.
Monczka, R. M., & Morgan, J. (1997). What’s wrong with supply chain management?(complex
new concept is slow to spread). Purchasing, 122(1), 69–72.
Mosco, V. (2009). The political economy of communication / Vincent Mosco. (2nd ed.). London:
SAGE.
Mueller, Rolf A. E. Emergence e-commerce in agriculture. University of California Agricultural
Issues Center Issues Brief. (2000), 14: 1–8.
Murray, D., & Raynolds, L. (2000). Alternative trade in bananas: Obstacles and opportunities for
progressive social change in the global economy. Agriculture and Human Values, 17(1),
65–74. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007628709393
Murray, K., & Worth, O. (2013). Building Consent: Hegemony, “Conceptions of the World” and
the Role of Evangelicals in Global Politics. Political Studies, 61(4), 731–747.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.01003.x
Nayak, S. K., Thorat, S. B., & Kalyankar, N. V. (2010). Reaching the Unreached A Role of ICT
in Sustainable Rural Development. arXiv:1002.2134 [cs]. Retrieved from
http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2134
Niemoczynski, Leon. (2013). 21st century speculative philosophy: Reflections on the "new
metaphysics" and its realism and materialism. Cosmos and History: The Journal of
Natural and Social Philosophy,9(2), 13-31.
197
Norris, P. (2001). Digital divide: civic engagement, information poverty, and the Internet
worldwide / Pippa Norris. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Oi, J. C. (1999). Rural China takes off: institutional foundations of economic reform / Jean C. Oi.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Organisation for European
Economic Co-operation, & Workshop on Agricultural Policy Adjustments in China after
WTO Accession Beijing, C. (2002). Agricultural policies in China after WTO accession.
Paris: OECD.
Patrick, I. (2004). Contract farming in Indonesia: Smallholders and agribusiness working
together (Technical Reports No. 113792). Australian Centre for International
Agricultural Research. Retrieved from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/aciatr/113792.html
Peci, A., & Falcão Vieira, M. M. (2009). The discursive formation of a scientific field.
Management & Organizational History, 4(1), 85–104.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1744935908098860
Pérez, Iván Corredor, and Barbolla, Ana M. Bernardos. (2014).
Exploring Major Architectural Aspects of the Web of Things. In Subhas Chandra
Mukhopadhyay (Ed.), Internet of Things Challenges and Opportunities, pp. 19-53.
Springer International Publishing.
Perry, E. J., & Heilmann, S. (2011). Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive
Governance in China. Retrieved from http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-
3:HUL.InstRepos:30821257
198
Pick, J. B., Gollakota, K., & Singh, M. (2013). Technology for Development: Understanding
Influences on use of Rural Telecenters in India. Information Technology for Development,
1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/02681102.2013.837806
Pieterse, J. N. (2005). Digital Capitalism and Development. Incommunicado Reader, 1, 11.
Prabakaran, R. (2003). Good Practices in Planning and Management of Integrated Commercial
Poultry Production in South Asia. Food & Agriculture Org.
Pratt, N. (2004). Bringing politics back in: examining the link between globalization and
democratization. Review of International Political Economy, 11(2), 311–336.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969229042000249831
Pticek, M., Podobnik, V., & Jezic, G. (2016). Beyond the Internet of Things: The Social
Networking of Machines. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 12(6),
1–15. https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/8178417
Rao, N. H. (2007). A framework for implementing information and communication technologies
in agricultural development in India. Technological Forecasting and Social Change,
74(4), 491–518. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2006.02.002
Ravenscroft, N., Moore, N., Welch, E., & Hanney, R. (2013). Beyond agriculture: the counter-
hegemony of community farming.(Report). Agriculture and Human Values, 30(4), 629–
639. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-013-9437-7
Risteska Stojkoska, B. L., & Trivodaliev, K. V. (2017). A review of Internet of Things for smart
home: Challenges and solutions. Journal of Cleaner Production, 140, 1454–1464.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.10.006
Roberts, D., & Lulu Chen. (2015). Alibaba leads China's hunt for rural consumers. Bloomberg
Businessweek, (4440), 12.
199
Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations / Everett M. Rogers (5th ed., Free Press trade pbk.
ed.). New York: Free Press.
Rogers, E. M. (1969). Modernization among peasants; the impact of communication [by] Everett
M. Rogers in association with Lynne Svenning. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Schiller, D., ebrary, Inc, & Schiller, D. (1999). Digital capitalism [electronic resource]:
networking the global market system. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Schiller, D., ebrary, & Schiller, D. (2014). Digital depression: information technology and
economic crisis. Urbana, Illinois; Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Schiller, H. I., & Schiller, H. I. (1984). Information and the crisis economy. Norwood, N.J.:
Ablex Pub. Corp.
Schoenberger, Chana, and Upbin, Bruce. (2002). The Internet of Things. Forbes, March 18.
Accessed from http://www.forbes.com/global/2002/0318/092.html.
Scott, J. C. (1985b). Weapons of the weak [electronic resource]: everyday forms of peasant
resistance / James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Shreck, A. (2005). Resistance, redistribution, and power in the Fair Trade banana initiative.
Agriculture and Human Values, 22(1), 17–29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-004-7227-
y
Siuli Roy, A. D., & Bandyopadhyay, S. (2008). Agro-sense: Precision agriculture using sensor-
based wireless mesh networks. In Innovations in NGN: Future Network and Services,
2008. K-INGN 2008. First ITU-T Kaleidoscope Academic Conference (pp. 383–388).
IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/KINGN.2008.4542291
Smith, C. S., & Mcdonald, G. (1998). Assessing the sustainability of agriculture at the planning
stage. Journal of Environmental Management, 52(1), 15–37.
200
https://doi.org/10.1006/jema.1997.0162
Thorpe, H. (2008). Foucault, Technologies of Self, and the Media. Journal of Sport & Social
Issues, 32(2), 199–229. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723508315206
Torero Cullen, M., & Von Braun, J. (2006). Information and communication technologies for
development and poverty reduction: the potential of telecommunications. Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Smythe, Dallas W. 1994. Counterclockwise. Boulder, CO: Westview Press
So, Alvin Y. (2009). Rethinking the Chinese developmental miracle. In Hung, and Hung, Ho-
fung (Eds.) China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism. Themes in Global Social
Change. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. 50–64.
Sun, Xinhua. (2015). The rise of large-scale agricultural entities and breakthroughs in
agricultural restructuring – using Hezhen in Southern Anhui as an example (Nongye
guimo jingying zhuti de xingqi yu tupoxing nongye zhuanxing – yi wannan hezhen weili
农业规模经营主体的兴起与突破性农业转型——以皖南河镇为例). Open Times ( 开
放时代), 5.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
Unger, J. (2002). The Transformation of Rural China. M.E. Sharpe.
Unwin, P. T. H. (2009). ICT4D: information and communication technology for development.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vesa, J. (2005). Mobile Services in the Networked Economy. Hershey, UNITED STATES: IGI
Global. Retrieved from
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=3308807
201
Vogeler, I. (1982). Myth of the Family Farm: Agribusiness Dominance of U.S .Agriculture (New
edition edition). Epping: Westview Press Inc.,U.S.
Wallis, C. (2015). Micro-entrepreneurship, new media technologies, and the reproduction and
reconfiguration of gender in rural China. Chinese Journal of Communication, 8(1), 42-58.
Wang, H. (1994). The industrialization in post-reform China and the changing composition of
rural elites (Gaige yilai zhongguo nongcun de gongyehua yu nongcunjingying goucheng
de bianhua 改革以来中国农村的工业化与农村精英构成的变化). Chinese Social
Sciences Quarterly, 8, 18-24.
Wang, S. (1987). The impact of economic institutional reform on Rural Social Relations. Peking
University Journal (Philosophy and Social Sciences) 24(3): 28–36.
Ward, J. (2015, January 1). Agriculture During the Reagan Years. ProQuest Dissertations
Publishing. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1840915424/?pq-
origsite=primo
Watts, M. (1992). Peasants and Flexible Accumulation in the Third World: Producing under
Contract. Economic and Political Weekly,27(30), PE90-PE97.
Webber, M. J. (2012). Making Capitalism in Rural China. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Webster, F. (2014). Theories of the Information Society. Routledge.
Williams, R., & Edge, D. (1996). The social shaping of technology. Research Policy, 25(6),
865–899. https://doi.org/10.1016/0048-7333(96)00885-2
Wong, X., Yen, D. C., & Fang, X. (2004). E-‐commerce development in China and its implication
for business. Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, 16(3), 68–83.
https://doi.org/10.1108/13555850410765230
202
Wortmann, F, and Flüchter. K. (2015). Internet of Things. Business & Information Systems
Engineering 57, no. 3 (2015): 221-24.
Xia, J. (2010). Linking ICTs to rural development: China’s rural information policy. Government
Information Quarterly, 27(2), 187–195. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2009.10.005
Xie, R., and Zhan, Zi. 2018. The state of rural e-commerce poverty alleviation and strategies
(Nongcun dianshang jingzhun fupin fazhan xianzhuang jiqi celue yanjiu 农村电商精准
扶贫发展现状及其策略研究). Rural E-commerce (Nongcun Dianshang 农村电商), 3.
Yan, H. (2003). Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow
through Labor Recruitment Networks. Cultural Anthropology, 18(4), 493–523.
https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2003.18.4.493
Yan, H. (2015). Introduction to the “development path of agriculture in China” (“Zhongguo
nongye de fazhan daolu” zhuanti daoyan “ 中国农业的发展道路” 专题导言). Open
Times ( 开放时代), 5.
Yan, H., and Chen, Y. (2015). The characteristics and orientations of the capitalization of
agriculture in China: Top-down and bottom-up drivers of its capitalization (Zhongguo
nongye zibenhua de tezheng he fangxiang: Zixiaershang he zishangerxia de zibenhua
dongli 中国农业资本化的特征和方向: 自下而上和自上而下的资本化动力). Open
Times ( 开放时代), 5.
Yang, S, and Hou, H. (1999) Consanguinity, Affinity, Kinship, and Interests-The rationalization
of the differential mode of association in contemporary rural Chinese society. Social
Sciences in Ningxia 97: 51–58.
Zeng, Fusheng, Kuang, Yuanpei, and Liu, Hui. “The innovation of China’s township level
agricultural technology service systems” (Zhongguo jiceng nongye keji fuwu tixi de
203
yunxing jizhi chuangxin 中国基层农业科技服务体系的运行机制创新). Hunan
Agricultural University Journal: Social Sciences. 2006, 7(2): 1-6.
Zhang ( 张谦), Q. F. (2013). Comparing Local Models of Agrarian Transition in China ( 中国农
业转型中地⽅方模式的⽐比较研究 ). Rural China, 10(1), 5–35.
https://doi.org/10.1163/22136746-12341235
Zhang, Q. F., Oya, C., & Ye, J. (2015). Bringing agriculture back in: the central place of agrarian
change in rural China studies. Journal of Agrarian Change, 15(3), 299-313.
Zhao, Y. (2008). Communication in China: political economy, power, and conflict / Yuezhi Zhao.
Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.
Zhao, Y., & Schiller, D. (2001). Dances with wolves? China’s integration into digital capitalism.
Info, 3(2), 137–151. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636690110801879
Zwass, Vladimir. "E-commerce." Britannica Online Academic Edition (2017): Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc. Web.
Abstract (if available)
Linked assets
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
Conceptually similar
PDF
Technical base, interests, and power in the two-level game of international telecom standards setting: the political economy of China's initiatives
PDF
Progressive technology, stagnant politics: how dating apps perpetuate gender hierarchy and transform relationships in urban China
PDF
Charge-mode analog IC design: a scalable, energy-efficient approach for designing analog circuits in ultra-deep sub-µm all-digital CMOS technologies
Asset Metadata
Creator
Wang, Wei
(author)
Core Title
Agricultural informatization and agrarian power dynamics in rural China
School
Annenberg School for Communication
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Communication
Publication Date
02/11/2020
Defense Date
05/09/2018
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
agricultural development,informatization,OAI-PMH Harvest,political economy,power dynamics,rural China
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Goodnight, Gerald (
committee chair
), Bar, François (
committee member
), Hong, Yu (
committee member
), Yang, Guobin (
committee member
)
Creator Email
wang458@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-65157
Unique identifier
UC11671402
Identifier
etd-WangWei-6731.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-65157 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-WangWei-6731.pdf
Dmrecord
65157
Document Type
Dissertation
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Wang, Wei
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
agricultural development
informatization
political economy
power dynamics
rural China