The Suzhi farmer: Constructing and contesting farming Subjectivities in post-Socialist China

What is it about?

A study of agricultural reforms and animal health in the Chinese pig farming industry. The cultural convention of suzhi defines good farming practices and produces new farming subjectivities with Chinese characteristics. Suzhi marginalises smallholders and reinforces existing socio-economic inequalities. Suzhi is negotiated and challenged, disguising actual animal health practices. Both national policies and local governance system has shaped the guanxi between officials and farmers discursively.

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Why is it important?

This paper examines the extent to which discourses of suzhi in a biosecurity context contributes to the use of preventive animal health practices, amongst pig farmers in Chongming Island, Shanghai. Drawing on documentary evidence and interviews with 33 farm animal breeders and 3 pig veterinary surgeons, the paper examines how suzhi contributes to the creation of ‘good farming’ subjectivities in order to modernise the animal health practices of pig farmers. The paper shows how suzhi contributes to the valourisation and stigmatization of different pig farming subjectivities, suggesting that it reinforces existing socio-economic inequalities. Moreover, the paper describes the ways in which modes of conduct associated with suzhi are negotiated and challenged and reduced to a symbolic ‘cloak’ that disguises the reality of preventive animal health practices.