Yue Liao

YUE LIAO, then a graduate student at University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, was awarded a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Feeding Shanghai: Chinese Greenhouse, Affect, and the Making of ‘Supply Chain qua World’ in Post-socialist China,” supervised by Dr. Jeffrey T Martin. This project explores the lifeworld of contemporary Chinese peasants engaged in a novel mode of agricultural production, which is not rooted in the soil but rather routed through advanced technologies. By examining the world-making aspect of the agricultural processes which bind Shanghai to a vegetable-growing hinterland 400 miles away in Lanling County, the study sheds light on how Lanlingnese farmers, operating as vegetable-producing/trading subjects, shape and are shaped by Shanghai’s food supply system. Relying on differentiated mobilities, these farmers both passively experience and actively imagine and construct the hidden infrastructure of provisioning through which the “security” and “freshness” of Shanghai’s vegetable market is generated. The study argues that contemporary Chinese peasants are engaged in a novel form of capital-intensive agriculture that is increasingly entangled in far removed urban foodways. Their participation in this supply chain allows them to create worlds for themselves in ways both empowering and challenging. The Shanghai-Lanling “supply chain qua world” serves as a lens into broader rural-urban dynamics as China pursues an integrated, self-contained domestic food supply system. Going beyond illustrating the influences on regional economies and post-socialist market reforms, the study addresses the pivotal question of how China can achieve self-sufficiency amid current neoliberal conditions.