One village, one product: Agro-industrial village corporatism in contemporary China

摘要

This paper investigates the implementation of "one village, one product" (OVOP) in four peri-urban villages in China's Yangtze River Delta. China's agricultural transformation, including the introduction of new corporate actors and the growing pressure of market discipline, has challenged the relevance of villages in the organization of agricultural production. In response, village cadres in thousands of Chinese villages have used OVOP to transform their villages into agro-industrial firms and re-exert their control over the agricultural surplus, echoing earlier examples of village corporatism. Rooted in agricultural specialization, OVOP encompasses a diversity of strategies for the production of locality-based value. I disaggregate these strategies into four sociospatial dimensions that comprise locality-place, network, territory, and scale. Place-based branding is the dominant strategy, but village cadres also pursue complementary sociospatial strategies to ensure their control over the realization of the brand's value and reconstitute their redistributive and administrative powers.