102 Views
China and Inner Asia
Organized Panel Session
Taking a long view, this paper investigates the reconstruction of a county tea industry in order to help map the emergence of China’s contemporary food system. The tea industry of Meitan County, Guizhou, began its transformation from dispersed sideline household production to a concentrated industry in the late 1930s under the auspices of the Nationalist government. Following 1949, county’s tea production was centralized under a single state-owned farm and factory, serving the export market. Yet with the decline of the state-owned industry in the late 1990s, the tea industry has continued to flourish—Meitan is China’s second largest tea-producing county. Now focusing on internal consumption, Meitan’s almost 500 independent tea processors market their products to the changing tastes of the internal market. How did this transformation from a single enterprise producing for export to a diversified industry producing for the national market happen? This paper maps the process in detail, paying attention to the roles played by multiple actors—from changing consumer tastes to local manufacturers and farmers—with the county government playing a crucial role. Despite the fact that the industry fractured from a single, state-owned enterprise to almost 500 producers, it has taken on a complex structure through a process of vertically integrating tea growers and producers in a way very different from the concentrated form of vertical integration that emerged beginning in the 1930s, making use of a county tea producers association, dragonhead enterprises, specialized cooperatives, and new property forms.
Alexander Day
Occidental College