Research

INTRODUCTION

In China, the millennium has witnessed a sustainability transition in agriculture, as evidenced by the emergence of certified organic farming, certified green food, and alternative food networks (Ye et al. 2002, Sanders 2006, Sheng et al. 2009, Si et al. 2015). A severe level of public food anxiety is the major impetus behind these farming initiatives, which are driven by both the state and the grassroots public (Scott et al. 2014). More recently, the Chinese government launched and solidified the Rural Revitalization strategy in 2017, at the 19th Congress, and in 2022, at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The strategy reinforces the sustainability transition in agriculture as a pathway to achieve high-quality, ecological rural development, and as a result, ecological agriculture is thriving. For example, organic agricultural acreage in China increased from 1.8 million hectares in 2010 to 2.4 million hectares in 2020 (iFoam 2022). In this latest increase, ecological agriculture is not shaped as a result-oriented and urban-served tool to address widespread food worries among consumers but rather as a process-oriented and rural-concerned scheme to revitalize the countryside for producers.^[1]

Whereas the government desires to facilitate rural revitalization through ecological agriculture (EA), a notion that denotes agricultural practices guided by ecological principles aimed at zero pollution and environmental protection, the authentic effect of EA on rural development is a topic of debate. A conspicuous phenomenon is the agroecological movement in Latin America, which has resulted in significant environmental, economic and political benefits to farmers and rural communities (Rosset et al. 2011, Altieri and Toledo 2011, Cid and Latta 2015). However, green farming practices alone partially explain this achievement. Altieri and Toledo (2011) argue that only by going beyond resource-conservation practices and enabling community-oriented, self-reliant, local-privileged, and farmer-embraced farming systems can agroecology achieve the full benefits of rural development. Thus, EA, which is dependent on external organic input, contributes modestly to the autonomy and food security of farmers.

Similarly, in the Global North, organic farming is a contested area because of its representativeness of an alternative rural economy. The possibility of organic farming improving biodiversity and achieving a value premium shrinks as organic products are subsumed into conventional food chains (Goodman 2000, Marsden and Smith 2005), i.e., as they are conventionalized (Guthman 2004). Nevertheless, organic farming can still contribute to rural development through para-agricultural activities in which farmers reconfigure “resources toward a wider variety of activities, leading to greater involvement in the local economy” (Darnhofer 2005:308). Lobley et al. (2009) also reported that the organic sector contributes to the local economy through both the direct agrofood economy and its derived new business routes. Rather than deepening the values attached to organic food and farming practices, broadening the ecological and sustainable values to cover nonagricultural activities suggests new links between organic farming and rural development (van der Ploeg et al. 2012).

To examine rural sustainability transitions, the past two decades have seen the prevalence of the framework of transitions from productivism to post-productivism (P/PP transitions; Wilson 2001, Evans et al. 2002). The P/PP framework has inspired many studies investigating on-the-ground agricultural and rural changes (Burton and Wilson 2006, Wilson 2008a, Brandth and Haugen 2011). Furthermore, the critical application of the framework serves as a heuristic device to enlighten conceptualizations such as multifunctional agriculture (Wilson 2001), rural development dynamics (Marsden et al. 2002), and ecological modernization (Evans et al. 2002).

More recently, the P/PP framework has been adopted to characterize China’s rural transitions (Huang et al. 2020, Wu and Gallent 2021, Zhang 2022). More importantly, however, EA seems to be a plausible cause of the emergence of post-productivism in China. EA and its related alternative food networks (AFNs) have achieved reconnections between food producers and consumers (Si et al. 2015), constructed an active food community (Ding et al. 2018), and created a meaningful and practical space on the farm rather than a productivist space (Xie 2021). Nonetheless, behind this post-productivism is a group of highly educated and economically well-off new farmers, and it is doubtful whether and how deep post-productivism has reached traditional farmers and penetrated rural areas (Si et al. 2015). In fact, Qi et al.’s (2021) study reveals a demarcation of EA between new farmers and local farmers, while Day and Schneider (2018) warn of the danger of simply “greenizing” rural areas rather than dissolving social relations with agribusiness production. Specifically, the influence of EA on generating post-productivist rural development could be specious.

The implementation of EA in the countryside requires deeper scrutiny with respect to its expected results to reinvigorate rural areas. Whether EA leads to major improvements in the ecological system of the countryside or a fundamental restructuring of the rural economy and society differs across cases. To this end, the P/PP framework provides a fascinating continuum for observing rural restructuring enabled by EA. Certain questions await answers. For instance, in addition to environmental enhancement, what types of rural ameliorations can EA facilitate in the countryside, and how? Is it an improvement in income or a revival of rural culture and lifestyle? Is it an agroecological pathway such as a Global South pathway or a farm diversification scheme such as a Global North pathway, or neither? To what extent does a rural community retreat from the agribusiness pattern? By exploring these questions, we can thoroughly understand rural revitalization through EA.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The major concern of this paper is whether and how EA facilitates rural development. By rural development, we mean shifting away from emphasizing the productivist function of agriculture to embracing varied post-productivist values (e.g., environmental concerns, countryside stewardship) and practices (e.g., rural tourism, quality production; Marsden 1998, Wilson 2001, Evans et al. 2002). We draw on Marsden et al.’s (2002) three models of rural development and a few other theoretical perspectives regarding the P/PP transition to conceptualize our framework.

Distinguishing post-productivism from productivism

Productivism and post-productivism comprise a pair of retrospective concepts (Wilson 2001, Zhang 2022). As institutional changes in Europe in the form of the Common Agricultural Policy have given more support to post-productivist related alternatives such as diversification, the countryside has been characterized by a reduced emphasis on mass food production. Post-productivism refers to the rising rural regime rejecting agro-industrial logic and the rationale of economies of scale (Marsden 1998). A post-productivist countryside is not an anonymous space located at the production end of a transnational food chain. However, the extreme industrialization of agriculture only aggravates the production function and the anonymity of the countryside (Marsden et al. 2002). Furthermore, negative environmental externalities are associated with productivist agriculture, thus resulting in the degradation of the rural ecosystem and, as a consequence, habitability. At the same time, farmers are put on the “agricultural treadmill,” which locks them into the pursuit of productivity and the associated adoption of new technologies (Horlings and Marsden 2011). At the rural community level, productivism entails adverse consequences such as the loosening of social ties, a lack of socio-cultural capital, and weak solidarity (Wilson 2009). Therefore, post-productivism stresses alternative ways of rural development that restore rural environmental and social vitality.

Despite its popularity, the accuracy of using the P/PP framework to ascertain on-the-ground rural changes has been questioned by scholars. Evans et al. (2002) criticize dualism within the P/PP framework because it simplifies a more complicated retainment while deviating from production centrality. Similarly, Wilson (2008a:367) notes the weakness of the P/PP framework to describe changes “that are often characterized by nonlinearity, heterogeneity, complexity and inconsistency.” In line with this thinking of theoretical–practical asymmetry, Burton and Wilson (2006) present the hysteresis between structural- and individual-level P/PP transitions. The above criticisms correspond to Cloke and Goodwin’s (1992) argument of the dominance of political economy approaches in theorizing the P/PP framework.

Building a ground-level framework

Distinguished from a structure focus based on a political economy, studies on P/PP have attempted to achieve a ground-level focus by incorporating geographical and sociological perspectives. The ground-level focus is exemplified by farm-level studies concerning the individual values, thoughts, and behaviors of farmers (Burton and Wilson 2006, Larder 2021) and by regional-level studies concerning social rules, economic patterns, and land management of communities (Holmes 2010, Argent 2011). Through these studies, post-productivism is not only a reflexive notion that points to productivism, but it is also a normative concept that describes and discerns complicated rural changes on the ground.

Whether post-productivism implies the declining significance of agriculture is controversial. Frequently, post-productivism involves the growth of the consumption countryside, where in-migrants renovate rural spaces according to a nostalgic rural idyll (Halfacree and Rivera 2012) or a blurring between urban and rural spaces, as rural areas exist only nominally (Halfacree 2006). Specifically, the post-productivist countryside regenerates itself by attaching to the urban economy. What is missing from post-productivism is the uniqueness and vigor that rural communities possess in nature (e.g., local agricultural knowledge and cooperative traditions), as well as the ability to feed the rising global population in any turn to post-productivism. Therefore, scholars stress the need to amend the theoretical exclusion of agriculture in rural development and acknowledge various functions of agriculture (Wilson 2008a, 2008b, Wilson and Burton 2015) or to scrutinize agrarian-based rural development that prioritizes agriculture (Marsden et al. 2002).

Marsden et al.’s (2002) model of agrarian-based rural development further builds up the heuristic device of post-productivism. The model articulates three dimensions to estimate the position of agriculture in post-productivist rural communities. (1) Agricultural activity responses to the price/cost-squeeze on agriculture. Specifically, although the rationale counters economies of scale, it conforms to economies of scope and encourages increasing ranges and values of agricultural production and services, thereby increasing value-added or employment opportunities in the agricultural sector. (2) Agricultural activity expresses new relationships between the agricultural sector and society. Agricultural activity returns the right to define agriculture to the hands of the people who produce it. In this way, farmers can be relieved of the producer identity and instead obtain multiple identities. (3) Agricultural activity implies a redefinition, recombination, and reconfiguration of rural resources. Clearly, rural resources such as natural resources and local knowledge are, to varying extents, belittled in the productivist regime. Therefore, alternative and rural-prioritized development is achieved only by reshaping the utilization of rural resources.

In this paper, we generalize the three dimensions into the economic rationale of agriculture, the social recognition of agriculture, and the resource configuration of agriculture. In this way, we denote three distinct but interactive directions through which agriculture can reorganize the rural developmental pathway. In these three dimensions, one can interpret ground-level values and practices and thereby measure diverse post-productivist rural development (Table 1). First, the post-productivist economic rationale calls for the realization of value-adding through synergies and diversified activities on farms, whereas agricultural practices focus on biodiversity rather than efficiency (Duru and Therond 2015). The latter embarks on technological solutions to environmental problems (Horlings and Marsden 2011), while the former builds strong ecosystems through multiple cropping or mixed cropping and other strategies to increase soil strength (Magdoff 2007, Hedberg 2015). Second, post-productivist social recognition embraces multifunctional agriculture and thus challenges the sole identity of farmers as food producers. The farmer embodies many roles including conservationist, diversifier, entrepreneur, guardian, and inhabitant (Burton and Wilson 2006, Seuneke et al. 2013). More broadly, at the village level, the social value of “good” farming is also different from that of production but tends toward greater-than-production (Larder 2021).

Third, the post-productivist resource configuration entails the proactive production of rural space rather than the passive use of spatial resources to maximize output. A post-productivist spatial presentation thus comprises policy changes away from productivism, in-migration demanding a rural idyll, and heterogeneous spatial practices (Halfacree 2006, Halfacree and Rivera 2012). In contrast, a productivist countryside may envision the transformation of residential space (e.g., residential concentration, separation from production, removal of disorderly spaces) where farmers claim spatial rights in their everyday lives (Zhang 2022).

METHODS

Our empirical cases involve two villages engaging in EA near Nanjing, a city located within the Yangtze Delta (Fig. 1). The region has a long history of traditional agriculture because of its geographical advantage in terms of soil and water supplies. In contemporary China, Nanjing is the capital of Jiangsu Province. According to Jiangsu statistical reports, the urbanization rate of Nanjing reached 87.2% in 2023. The municipal GDP was 174.21 billion CNY (US$24.34 billion), which is ranked second highest in the province and 10th nationally. The favorable environment enables Nanjing to take the lead in witnessing many EA-related initiatives, including EA farms, OFDC (China’s first organic certification body), the Organic Slow Life magazine, and more.

The case selection is performed according to the prominence of the cases representing two different pathways of transitioning to EA in Nanjing. The first case is Jinci village, which is in northern Nanjing and was selected as the first batch of villages piloting Jiangsu’s land consolidation program. As a result, Jinci participated in the development of an agriculture-tourism program called Barolo Eco-Valley, one of the most favorable tour sites among Nanjing residents. During our fieldwork in 2016, an officer at the Nanjing Agricultural Bureau recommended Jinci as a top representative case for EA transitions. The second case is Dai village, which is located in southern Nanjing and was authorized by Jiangsu provincial people’s government as “Dai’s experience” to promote provincial transitions to EA. Compared with the business approach in Jinci, Dai coordinated a farmer cooperative to produce organic rice.

For the fieldwork, the author visited the two villages in September 2016, August and September 2017, April 2019, and November 2023. Fifteen in-depth interviews were conducted with key actors (Table 2). All the interviews lasted three to eight hours (some were interviewed over a span of two or three days) and were transcribed into written transcripts. In addition, observations of on-farm production, rural residences, and working environments in the two villages constitute important data collection methods. Observations were conducted daily and were documented onto 30 field notes. Furthermore, 52 primary sources, including policy papers and news reports concerning agricultural development in the two villages, were collected and analyzed. Key issues concerning economic forms, social values, and resource usages were coded, highlighted, and scrutinized. The two stories related to the diverse post-productivist countryside are investigated and presented in the following section.

RESULTS

Toward a consumption countryside in Jinci Village

The transformation that occurred in Jinci was reported by the municipal party committee media as “break the cocoon into a butterfly.” In 2009, before the change started, Jinci was a typical traditional, remote hamlet characterized by muddy roads and dispersed cottages (Fig. 2-left). A severe level of village hollowing marked the space of Jinci and was reflected by the high out-migration rate of 87%. The per capita income in Jinci was less than 7000 CNY (US$981), which contrasted prominently with that of 25,600 CNY (US$3590) in 2019. In 2020, Jinci was endorsed as the provincial focal village of rural tourism. The dramatic change was co-produced by the early-stage provincial governmental plan of initiating productivism and the later-period business plan of shifting to post-productivism.

Development of ecological agritourism

The development of EA in Jinci village was initiated in 2008–2009, when the Jiangsu provincial government launched a land program called “a vast area of contiguous fertile land.” The land program sought first to transfer more residential land to be used as farmland via residential concentration and second to integrate fragmented land parcels into what was officially called “well-facilitated land,” with irrigation systems, electricity, and farming facilities. In 2009, Jinci village was selected as one of the pilot locations to conduct the land program, which has created more than 1000 ha of “well-facilitated land.” Specifically, 72% of residential land was converted to farmland.

Tremendous land consolidation has attracted agribusinesses for subsequent land usage. In 2014, the Yonghong Investment Company rented 667 ha of farmland from the Jinci village committee and established the Barolo Eco-Valley (Fig. 2-right). Barolo branded two lines of business. The first is the on-farm agritourism design, in which various theme farms, such as horseback riding, were developed to meet the urban tourist interest of a close-to-nature experience. The second and relatively small business line is quality food selling. Nevertheless, most of their agricultural products were sourced elsewhere so that the need to increase yields was nonexistent. The associated landscape design was designed mainly for agritourism rather than for food production.

Changes were associated with villagers’ income structure. Traditional revenue from selling agri-products was replaced by land rent, government allowances, and wages. First, the Barolo enterprise had to rent farmland from the village committee, which then paid rents to local villagers at an annual fixed price. In 2017, for example, each household in Jinci received an average annual rent revenue of 5300 CNY (US$750). Second, municipal fiscal policy has set a budget for rural development, which has enabled the township government to grant each household a small amount of allowance. Third, for the 571 villagers who were employed by Barolo, the average annual per capita wage was over 30,000 CNY (US$4243). Specific positions, such as field managers, received an annual income over 100,000 CNY (US$14,145).

There was also an explicit positive gain in economic expectations related to the monetary value of real estate property. Through residential concentration, villagers relocated from their old, dispersed dwelling sites to the newly constructed three-story buildings called Jinci homes (Fig. 3-a). The construction of a Jinci home involves a marketable attribute of land. In the interviews, the profit expectation among villagers was as follows:

In a few years, I’d be moved to Nanjing... Then, I can lease this apartment out; it is only 2 hours’ drive to downtown Nanjing; there should be a rental market. (Interview with interviewee #12)

Jinci is close to Liuhe (a jurisdiction in Nanjing). If the township expanded, we would be included and urbanized immediately. (Interview with interviewee #10 when asking him to talk about the real estate market in Jinci)

The above interviews show the local villagers’ desire to reclaim their entitlement to land use (Yep and Forrest 2016) when facing rapid urbanization and enormous urban–rural economic disparities. It also suggested a general rejection among Jinci villagers of a productivist countryside that committed land to agriculture but an embrace of a post-productivist village where distinctiveness between urban and rural areas was waning and the shifted land usage produced an effaced rurality (Halfacree 2006).

Distancing from farmer status

Derived from a productivist governmental scheme at first, the shifting to EA in Jinci led to the construction of a consumption countryside thereafter. Together with other land programs, such as Chongqing’s Securitized Land Exchange System^[2] and Shandong’s Merger of Villages,^[3] Jiangsu’s land consolidation program corresponds to the central state campaign of envisioning productivist rural development (Zhang 2022). However, the opening of rural land resources to urban capitals led to the afterward post-productivist development. The utilization of rural spaces by Barolo is highly associated with consumption relations, which may or may not be linked to production (Pinto-Correia et al. 2014). The countryside is then characterized by increasing post-productivist activities such as leisure and consumption (Renting et al. 2009).

The creation of a consumption countryside also resulted in the loss of rural substance in villagers’ everyday lives. The rehabilitation of villagers to the Jinci home included a more modern lifestyle (Fig. 3-b). The Jinci home had full access to modern infrastructure, ranging from electricity and running water to the internet and garbage collection services. This significantly altered the ways in which villagers interacted with the surrounding environment and manipulated resources for everyday production, such as farming and cooking. An interviewee described his gradual adaptation to the modern lifestyle:

We were not used to stairs, especially for my mom, who is over 80. Before we just opened the door and started to do some physical work, washing the vegetables and picking the bad ones to feed chickens ... but it is clean now, everywhere. But I do like the upgraded bathroom. So, it is fine, if you open your mind, climbing stairs is also a kind of exercise. (Interview with interviewee #10)

Along with the residential shift, there was a change in life rhythm. For villagers hired by Barolo or other enterprises in Jinci, the work schedule was fixed, within which work hours, family time, and leisure time were neatly separated rather than intertwined (Vanek 1980). Employees were required to take a one-hour lunch break at noon to rest and attend to other family business. Furthermore, commuting became an inevitable everyday routine:

Nowadays nobody walks! Haha, every household has motor bikes. I ride to Barolo, ride to the town, to visit my friends and relatives. It’s convenient and faster. (Interview with interviewee #13)

Occupationally, Jinci villagers took multiple nonfarming positions spread over Barolo’s agrotourist sites. Through interviews with villagers, their daily expressions to refer to their jobs were “work in the restaurant/inns,” “manage the fields,” and “follow the arrangement from my leaders” rather than “farming.” Additionally, the preference for nonfarming positions was greater than that for farming jobs, made evident by the common fact that villagers resorted to guanxi (a relation from whom one can benefit) with hired employees to acquire nonfarming jobs. The emotional attachment to agriculture and agrarian land was weakened to some extent. Although Barolo maintained EA activities, such activities fail to revitalize the economic and social vigor of agriculture. In this sense, agriculture maintains its importance as a backdrop to support and grow consumption-related economic forms, as do the people whose status has changed from farmer to service personnel.

Effaced rurality but preserved social solidarity

With the development of agritourism and the loss of farmer status, the peasant farming lifestyle has been reformed and conserved in a collective way. The enormous land program in Jinci accommodated residents’ subsistence farming to some extent. For example, right beside the Jinci home, the local authorities developed a large community garden (Fig. 3-c). The community garden was divided into tiny plots and allocated to the Jinci residents. Site visits and interviews revealed that villagers used the land to plant leafy greens, guaranteeing family consumption of fresh and seasonal food.

The specific land use plan of the community garden significantly preserved the social relations and farming traditions in Jinci (Fig. 3-d). During rush hour, when residents leave work, they head to their farming lots for regular maintenance. Moreover, they chat with neighbors to exchange various information, including market news, work news, and updates of village affairs and local celebrities. In this farming neighborhood, one can easily perceive an embedded rural community where strong ties naturally exist between members (Granovetter 1973). However, the original farming culture was transformed such that rural collectivity remained, but agricultural collaboration was not necessary. The conservation of subsistence farming and rural solidarity likely explains why Jinci saw no protests against land consolidation that occurred elsewhere in China.

Toward a rejuvenated agricultural community in Dai village

Transitioning to post-productivist development in Dai was the original intention of the inspirational retired researcher Zhao, who devoted himself to promoting organic farming. Dai village is one of the optimal choices for implementing EA because of the ecological environment. However, the benign farming milieu was the reverse side of low economic development. In 2001, before the arrival of Zhao, Dai was one of the most severely poor villages in Jiangsu. The per capita income of residents in Dai was less than 3000 CNY (US$419) in 2003, whereas it was 8500 CNY (US$1189) in 2011 and 25000 CNY (US$3496) in 2017. Given the lack of landscape superiority of large plains to stimulate productivism (Fig. 4-left), EA was designated as the new direction for rural development.

Developing scope economies of EA

The transition to EA in Dai village was built upon and reinforced by the economies of scope. In scope economies, a firm relies on the profitability of the integrative production of multiple products (de Roest et al. 2018). In agriculture, scope economies are buttressed by two levels of synergy: “those synergies between different activities on the farm, and those which are associated with the networks of exchange, cooperation, and competition between the farm and the local and regional sphere” (Marsden et al. 2002:816). Dai witnessed the operationalization of the former synergy at the farm level to enrich output lines and the latter synergy at the village level to condense collaboration.

At the farm level, after the arrival of Zhao, he persuaded and collaborated with villager T to plant an organic peach orchard. Frustrated with a rare harvest at first, the superior-quality harvest in the fourth year earned them a price 10 times higher than the wholesale price. This tremendous success impressed the Dai villagers, and a few of them were convinced of the feasibility of running organic farms. By our last visit in 2023, eight villagers had established ecological family orchards (Fig. 4-right). Seven of them employed mixed farming and breeding. In addition, five farm owners described value-adding approaches based on EA, including restaurants, farm processed food, training courses focused on farming knowledge, and on-farm leisure activities. In this regard, EA farms rejected monocultural planning and mass marketing and instead reactivated the knowledge and values embedded in EA.

At the village level, EA was launched through the establishment of a farmer cooperative (Fig. 5-a). Because of the success of individual farms, interest in implementing EA has increased among Dai villagers. In 2005, Zhao and the village committee conducted a household survey regarding the willingness of villagers to join a co-op for organic production, and it passed by a majority. In 2006, with help from the village committee, more than 100 households together established a co-op for rice production. Later, as the co-op expanded its marketing capacity, an increasing number of villagers pooled land. By 2013, 812 households (93% of households) had joined the co-op.

Despite the gradual scaling up, the co-op complied with the principle of quality production rather than the productivist logic. The interviews revealed that the co-op has been adjusting profit-sharing policies to address quality concerns. The previous policy of “sharing according to outputs,” i.e., for one kilogram of organic rice, a farmer received 4.2 CNY (US$0.6), caused a serious problem of chemical usage. In 2015, the co-op shifted to “sharing according to land shares” and increased the fixed price to 31,000 CNY (US$4380) per ha in an effort to restrain profit seeking through fertilizer abuse. Furthermore, the co-op also received organic certification to guarantee its rice quality.

Another significant feature was the synergistic networks among the local villagers, the co-op, and other external actors in Dai. Inside the village, villagers spent most of their time working on the land that was de jure transferred to the co-op but de facto belonged to them (Fig. 5-b). Specifically, it never altered the geographical distance between household and land or the residential distribution in the village. In the words of Interviewee #3, “We tried to maintain the original shape and left villagers’ businesses to villagers.” The inherent social relations explained the smoothness of the labor division, in which softer jobs were assigned to a group of elders and technical jobs were assigned to younger villagers. For villagers who migrated to cities for jobs, their land was distributed to other adjacent and capable villagers.

In addition to the internal network, external relations are also highly important. The dispatched village officials and Zhao were key pillars of the co-op. They were, on the one hand, co-op managers who were responsible for profitability and, on the other hand, public servants subjected to political attention from higher-level government officials. Therefore, external actors were stressed both to make a fortune and to realize common prosperity. The synergistic effect was the result of protective profit sharing among villagers with the co-op sharing 80% of the net profit and saving the remaining 20% for a public welfare fund. Compared with Jinci, where land was transferred for land rent, in Dai, the possession of land formed stronger inclusiveness and allowed the villagers to have a voice as land shareholders.

Growing sense of pride as farmers

In sharp contrast to the effaced rurality in Jinci, the land pooling in Dai contributed to the re-evaluation of land and the joint hands of villagers. Whereas it is the external actors who made plans for the co-op, a few elected villagers formed a committee to hold meetings and negotiate plans with and for the co-op. Therefore, complicated relations of “reliance-repulsion” existed between local villagers and outsiders:

I must say Zhao dedicated a lot in shaping our current organic industry. Especially the first few years, when there was no return without his dedication, I doubt I would have persisted in organic farming.

The land arrangement is our decision after all; he (Zhao) provided suggestions. We can’t count on him for everything, you know? He spent a lot of time here, in the fields but not in the office, and we trust him, for agriculture matters (not for sociopolitical matters). (Interview with a native interviewee #2)

A nonlocal village official also expressed a sense of repulsion:

The village work is almost an impossible mission for outsiders. They tend to reject my proposals without hesitation. I spent a lot of time building relations with them, chatting with them, helping with gardening, and providing conveniences to be slowly accepted by them. (Interview with interviewee #6)

To some extent, Dai maintained an interior entity that prudently selected and accepted outsiders who proved their harmlessness and economic contributions. This selective power gained rural community superiority in negotiating their visions of rural development. This finding likely explains the preservation of the original habitants and life rhythm that conserved the rurality of everyday life in Dai.

The implementation of EA also provided a sense of dignity to farming. For decades, there had been an urban–rural duality in China that resulted in negative social perception of farmers as second-class citizens (Li 2008) and of farming as a laborious task that generated a low income (Xie 2021). In Dai, we observed an amelioration of despising farmers, as they were not inferior to village officials or to urban customers. For example, farm runners and their loyal customers built more than market relations, as the former innovated various on-farm activities that cater to the latter, and the latter pay back with generosity. The purpose of this generosity was also to build a positive relationship with the farmer so they could arrange customized trips in the future.

Mr. Liu, one of my loyal customers, just called a week ago and asked whether he could bring friends here and asked me and my wife to prepare lunch for them. ... next day, they brought their families here, men were sitting inside chatting while boiling tea, and women were outside with children, watching little chicks, climbing trees, and playing around ... they thanked me for my hospitality when they left. One of Liu’s friends, Mr. Wang, even added my WeChat and proposed organizing team-building activities here in the future. (He showed me their WeChat conversation while talking). (Interview with interviewee #1)

The farmers derived a sense of pride as they gained intelligence through the entrepreneurial management of ecological farms. Rather than being solely food producers, farmers gained in reputation by being accepted as farmer entrepreneurs (Seuneke et al. 2013). Through running farms, farmers gained knowledge of EA and developed skills related to customer maintenance and market innovation. For many interviewees, workshops regarding EA from time-to-time remarkably broadened their perspectives. Several farmers mentioned the expectation that the next generation would return to the countryside and become farmers, which was in sharp contrast to the previous practice of defaming farmers as low class (Schneider 2014).

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Productivism represents a rural developmental pathway in which industrialized chemical agriculture is governmentally promoted and socially recognized to maximize food production. On the basis of our cases, a tentative finding is that EA has shifted full-scale transitions away from the dominant productivist rural development to different post-productivist ends. The finding of the P/PP transition echoes numerous studies on transitional rural landscapes in both the Global North and the Global South (Mather et al. 2006, Liu et al. 2022, Neilson 2022). Nevertheless, disparities exist among regions. In the Global North, the appropriate situation of the changing agricultural paradigms within or beyond a neat P/PP shift raises greater concerns (Beacham et al. 2023), thus resulting in further theorizations on neo-productivism (Wilson and Burton 2015, Rannikko and Salmi 2018) and super-productivism (Mackay and Perkins 2019). However, in the Global South post-productivism is largely characterized by the consumption of rural space by urban interests manifesting in the form of tourism, in-migrants, second homes, and other leisure- and amenity-led activities (Huang et al. 2020, Wu and Gallent 2021, Neilson 2022).

Notwithstanding the apparent distinction, the findings of this study are not intended to reinforce the north-south dichotomy. Instead, following Gray et al.’s (2020) convergent thinking, this study argues that the dichotomous symptom of post-productivism diagnosed between the Global North and Global South is perhaps less pronounced. Using Jinci and Dai as cases, post-productivist transitions driven by both corporate interests and inspirational individuals do not contribute to agricultural inertia entirely. Conversely, EA principles and practices and the resulting value added from agri-food quality and other-than-food consumption have increasingly been recognized by both consumers and producers. This quality shift reveals, at the least, a common desire for a more ecologically sound agricultural sector (Winter 2003). The departure from productivist agriculture is seemingly popular, especially in the suburban countryside of China, where urban consumption demands significantly influence the rural economic structure (Zhang et al. 2014). Our cases, which are positioned in wealthy southeastern cities, also exemplify the common sustainable agricultural transitions occurring throughout suburban rural China.

Moreover, this study does not deny that deagrarianization frequently occurred in late-industrializing countries such as China, along with its affiliated post-productivist peculiarities (see Neilson 2022). Rather, the empirical findings further divide the concept of post-productivism into diverse versions. Jinci and Dai represent “a consumption version of the post-productivist countryside” and “an agriculture-revitalized version of the post-productivist countryside,” respectively, as shown in Table 3.

In Jinci, spatial-economic change opened rural land resources to urban capitals, which resulted in a tourism economy as reflected in many other cases (Wu and Gallent 2021, Liu et al. 2022). Although agriculture maintains its importance as a backdrop for developing agritourism, there was a loss of everyday life satisfaction for farming and a rejection of the status of farmers. The effaced rurality demonstrated a production of externalized rural space that not only was attractive to outsiders but also to urbanized villagers who yearned to blur the urban-rural boundaries. In contrast, in Dai, land pooling concentrated resources in the hands of the co-op and elevated the economy of scope, which realized synergetic effects via diversification and collaboration. During this process, agriculture restored its dominance in terms of both the economic payback to and the socioeconomic status of the farmers. The reinforced rurality corresponded to the radical vision of revitalizing the farming culture and community (Halfacree 2006). Dai’s experience was associated with the production of endogenous rural space, which the villagers prudently resisted, while resorting to outsiders and gradually cultivating the intelligence and pride of the farmers.

This paper incorporates dialogues with rural sustainability transition scholars who stress the significance of, but also warn of, the uncritical and binary application of post-productivism. By exploring the diverse post-productivist countryside, this paper corresponds to Evans et al.’s (2002) criticism of P/PP dualism, especially the indiscriminate match of the P/PP transition to omnipotent resolutions of rural dilemmas. In fact, whether conceptualizing the ideal post-productivism or practical transition, efforts to adopt post-productivism are challenging and always in flux. Dai’s experience, even though representing a strong post-productivist transition, is subjected to the unique individual thrust toward developing EA. Although the social and political routes of integrating outsiders in Dai demonstrate transferable experiences for other rural places (a paper is under review), the possession of solid exogenous support is exclusive. Nonetheless, post-productivism still proves important and appropriate as a conceptual buoy for designing and examining multidirectional and heterogeneous rural changes in China. The meticulous application of the P/PP framework provides a more complete picture of the sustainability transition that rural places could implement.

A key contribution to the P/PP framework of this paper is a further division of post-productivism on the basis of empirical experience, thus demonstrating the importance of considering a socio-spatial lens. Specifically, for the problem of oversimplifying a sustainability transition, previous theoretical refinements of the P/PP framework have entailed a broad index system in which practical changes in various economic, political, social, ecological, and spatial dimensions are identified to delineate post-productivism (Mather et al. 2006, Wilson 2008b, Horlings and Marsden 2011, Duru and Therond 2015). Although the above conceptualizations address the directions or levels the rural transitions have taken as they deviated from productivism, the underexplored question is to what extent post-productivism has penetrated the rural community (Zhang 2022).

This deficiency can be addressed by adopting a socio-spatial lens to observe the depth of the rural sustainability transition. In our cases, for instance, both Jinci and Dai witnessed territorial rearrangement of land and space. However, our study reveals disparate spatial accommodations for the farming culture, one which retains rural collectivity but dissolves agricultural collaboration, and the other that recovers and reinforces the agricultural community. Future research could explore and evaluate multiform spatial accommodations in rural sustainability transitions, to discover whether the rural community can survive the “trial by space” during P/PP transitions (Halfacree 2007).

We began this paper with the question of whether transitioning to EA can facilitate rural revitalization. Although the answer to this question varies from case to case, our findings suggest that EA opens the door to post-productivist rural development for the countryside. Nevertheless, considering the socio-spatial lens, we further propose a few more directions for detailed policy considerations. First, land entitlement and the inclusion of peasants should be carefully explored (Zhang and Donaldson 2008). In China and many other countries, land consolidation is a widely recognized approach to activate and reconfigure exogenous and endogenous resources, while the assimilation of peasants through land entitlement is a highlighted principle (Liu et al. 2020, Zhou et al. 2020). Our cases suggest inclusions of farms as both economic beneficiaries and as in-depth participants during land consolidation. Whether land entitlement entails the economic redistribution to or the political participation of farmers should be considered. Second, spatial accommodations for local culture and lifestyle are highly important. Greater rural revitalization can be achieved only if more nuanced linkages between land and people and between spatial restructuring and socio-cultural adaptation are considered.

__________

^[1] In the CPC Central Committee’s 11th five-year plan of domestic economic and social development published in 2006, discourses on ecological agriculture (EA) are subordinated to the political requirement of adjusting the industrial structure of agriculture. Particularly, the adjustment is to “building the industry of advantageous agri-products” and to “enhancing the international competitiveness of agri-products.”
In the CPC Central Committee’s 14th five-year plan of domestic economic and social development published in 2021, discourses on promoting EA comply with the new political requirement of “greening the producing methods and lifestyles in the countryside, and improving the rural ecological environment.”
^[2] Chongqing’s Securitized Land Exchange System entailed a platform of rural land transaction. It corresponded to the severe socio-political background of land fragmentation that restrained agricultural productivity, and land abandonment as people largely migrated to cities. Therefore, the system enabled rural households to exchange residential land for income, and the village collective to restore large-scale farmland.
^[3] Shandong’s Merger of Villages was under the similar background of land fragmentation and village hollowing. The policy supported a rehabilitation of farmers from adjacent villages to a newly constructed community, which resulted in the reclamation and consolidation of farmland.

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