MODERN MEAT, INDUSTRIAL SWINE: CHINA AND THE REMAKING OF AGRI-FOOD POLITICS IN THE 21ST CENTURY A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Mindi Leigh Schneider August 2013 © 2013 Mindi Leigh Schneider MODERN MEAT, INDUSTRIAL SWINE: CHINA AND THE REMAKING OF AGRI-FOOD POLITICS IN THE 21ST CENTURY Mindi Leigh Schneider, Ph. D. Cornell University 2013 This dissertation examines the causes and consequences of the industrialization of pig farming in reform era China. As one of the most dramatic agricultural transformations in the world today, the shifting conditions and relations of livestock and meat production in China have profound social and environmental impacts for communities and agroecosystems in both local and global contexts. Investigating how modernity and food security are defined, practiced, and legitimated through the country’s agricultural development model, and to what effect for social equality and environmental sustainability, is the primary task of this work. The study is framed around the meatification project, a concept that directly engages the intentional and constructed nature of the shift of meat from the periphery to the center of human diets. I’ve defined the meatification project as “a strategically managed set of policies, discourses, relations, and resources enacted with the goal of increasing commodity meat production, modern forms of meat consumption, and agribusiness profits.” Framed around pork and the processes involved in its making, my approach combines theories of development, political economy, and political ecology to explore the politics and consequences of industrial pork production and the rise of domestic agribusiness since Reform and Opening in 1978. The work is principally concerned with understanding how these agricultural transformations impact smallholder farmers, rural environments and social reproduction, food security and class diets, as well as how the form and management of China’s agricultural development model is remaking global agri-food politics. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Mindi Schneider received a BS in Horticulture Production with a minor in Philosophy from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 2000. After working on organic farms, as a professional horticulturalist, and as a florist, she returned to the University of Nebraska to study agricultural science and agroecology. There she earned an MS in Agronomy with a minor in Environmental Science. Propelled by questions about the politics of sustainably in agriculture, she came to Cornell University’s Department of Development Sociology. Her major area of concentration for the PhD is in the Political Economy of Development, with minors in Environmental Sociology and International Agriculture and Rural Development. iii For Ruth Anne. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to Philip McMichael, the chair of my dissertation committee, my mentor, and a constant source of support and inspiration. From him I have learned how to be a scholar with my heart on my sleeve, and to take academic risks for the issues and politics I believe in. My way of thinking has been forever – and for the better – transformed by our relationship. Thanks to Alice Pell for challenging me to bridge sociology and agricultural science, for invaluable insights, and for encouraging me as a woman and a scholar. And thanks to Max Pfeffer for always asking the right question at the right moment. I am indebted to this committee for years of intellectual enthusiasm and personal care. Thank you to my parents, Ron and Kristi Schneider, for always believing in me and teaching me how to believe in myself. In China I was privileged to work with the Sichuan Agricultural University, the South China Agricultural University, the Liang Shuming Rural Reconstruction Center, Oxfam Hong Kong, and Solidaridad China. I am especially grateful to Derk Byvanck, Martin Ma, Huang Song, Nian Hai, Wang Debin, Dong Rui, the Ge family, and Li Xuewei for their generosity and patience. Thanks also to Shine Gao, Yu LiMing, Wang Yongli, and Mei Hua for inviting me into their worlds and showing me such kindness. To Erika Kuever, Matthew Hale, and Travis Klingberg – friends and colleagues with whom I shared life and work in “the field” and beyond – thank you for everything; Beijing and Chengdu wouldn’t have been the same without you. My years in graduate school have been enhanced and made bearable by a very special set of friends and motivators: Chuck and Barb Francis, Marion Dixon, Lindsay Gilmour, Chris Seeds, S.P. Seeds, Jeni Wightman, Evren Dincer, Rodrigo Alatriste-Diaz, Michaela Brangan, Kelly Dietz, Emelie Peine, Marygold Walsh-Dilley, Jennifer Blesh, Danika Davis, Sequoia Davis, the Habermans, the Sorensens, Nishaan Sandhu, RuPaul, Tara Nelson, Marcie Farwell, Terry Boyd-Zhang, Nathan (Xiangzi) Zhang, Miss Piggy, Shannon Van Sant, Phillippa Hunt, and Loud Sue. You are all delightful, and I’m charmed to count you among my people. v Thank you to Devlin Kuyek at GRAIN for collaboration and inspiration. Thanks to Jim Harkness at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy for seeing value and contradiction in “feeding China’s pigs.” To MaryKay Magistad, Cassandra Herrman, Nicola Davison and Kim Hunter Gordon: thank you for caring. I wish to acknowledge, with gratitude, the institutions that provided financial support for this project. I owe much to the Department of Development Sociology, the East Asia Program, the Jeffrey Sean Lehman Fund for Scholarly Exchange with China, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the FALCON program at Cornell University. I also wish to express thanks to the Fulbright-Hays program, and to Oxfam Hong Kong and Solidaridad China for so generously supporting my work. Finally, Gayatri Menon deserves particular acknowledgement for helping me understand when to tone it down, when to turn it up, and when to dance it out. Thank you, G, for understanding me. Djahane Salehabadi has been my dear friend, my confidence-boosting- cheerleader, and my kindred spirit throughout this dissertation process - she makes me want to be a better person, which is the most one can hope for in a friend and a colleague. Claire Nelson is my calm and steadying force, BJ Ohme is the connection to my core, and Emily Snider is the person who has most helped me give voice to my heart. I love you all. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch ……………………………………………………………………… iii Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………. iv Chapter One Introduction: The Meatification Project in Reform Era China …………………………... 1 Chapter Two Pork and Beans Development: The Making of Modern Meat …………………………… 22 Chapter Three The Metabolism of Meatification ………………………………………………………... 51 Chapter Four Nongmin Discourses: Constructing a Problem for Industrial Agriculture to Solve ……… 85 Chapter Five Dragon Head Enterprises and the State of Agribusiness in Reform Era China ………….. 111 Chapter Six Conclusion: Meatification Trajectories …………………………………………………... 143 Appendix …………………………………………………………………………………. 163 References ………………………………………………………………………………... 165 vii Chapter One INTRODUCTION The MEATIFICATION PROJECT in REFORM ERA CHINA _____________ “Meat signifies wealth. The more money you have, the more meat you will eat.” CEO and founder of a commercial pork production enterprise Shanghai, January 2007 “In China, everyone eats pork.” Manager of an online food marketing company Chengdu, November 2010 Meatscapes in China China is awash with meat. On most any street in Beijing, there is some combination of meat on sticks, meat in soups, meat on platters, meat in tubes, meat on hooks. These items are sold fresh and processed from street vendor carts; in mom and pop stores; in wet markets, supermarkets, and hypermarkets; and at restaurants that range from a grill and a few stools on the sidewalk, to regionally-specialized dining spots, to domestic and transnational fast food stores, to ultra-modern palaces of haute cuisine. In the almost two years I spent living in Beijing between 2008 and 2011, I found meatscapes1 composed of chicken, duck, beef, mutton, horse, deer, 1 By “meatscapes,” I do not intend a direct connection to Arjun Appanduri’s (1996) five “-scapes” of global cultural flows. A “meatscape” can be considered to include the various forms of meat (types, cuts, sources, markets, relations) available at a particular time and in a particular place. 1 donkey, dog, seafood, scorpion, and most importantly, pork. In Mandarin Chinese, the word for meat (rou 肉) means pork2, the so-called national food (Wang and Watanabe, 2007). Outside of Beijing, the streets of China’s cities are similarly flooded with meat, and people buying and selling it. I lived in Chengdu, a metropolis of 11 million in southwest China, for nine months in 2010. As the capital of Sichuan Province, the country’s largest pig producing province, Chengdu is at the heart of China’s contemporary pork boom. The city’s meatscape is as diverse as Beijing’s, ranging from tiny street vendors peddling meat from the back of bicycles to massive global retailers with brightly lit meat cases offering a China-specific variety of both packaged and cut meats. I visited wet and hyper markets on my own, and went shopping with friends and neighbors – women in their late 60s and their grandchildren for whom they are the primary caregivers – to get a sense of the different arrangements through which pork arrives at the market, as well as to understand how meat relates to notions of development and modernity in China today. For many in the city, especially people like my middle-to-upper class neighbors, buying and eating meat is a daily activity, and a meal without meat is considered no meal at all. But while rising meat consumption is positively correlated with income and urbanization, the thoroughfares in towns and villages are also and increasingly sites of meat commerce. Urban and rural meat consumption is anything but even, with city dwellers eating on average almost twice as much meat as those in the countryside (Ministry of Agriculture, 2009).