Redesigning the Rural: System Thinking and China’s Agrarian Modernization
What caused the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic? We may never know whether the virus spilled from a pangolin at the Huanan Food Market in Wuhan, or, as conspiracy theories suggest, it leaked from the nearby Institute of Virology. Yet this distinction between a natural and an artificial genesis might constitute a false dichotomy. Both hypotheses ground the pandemic in the same dynamic: China’s ongoing restructuring of its food systems, and the associated changes of animal and pathogen ecologies.
For more than a decade now, the Chinese state has been replacing small-scale family agriculture with intensive corporate farms nationwide (Figure 1). This transformation has entailed the replanning, redesigning, and physical reconstructing of most of the country’s villages and their environments. Multi-story pig hotels breeding around 3000 animals per floor are no longer uncommon in rural China. Mechanized plantations for genetically modified rice varieties also serve as ponds for catfish and crawfish farming. Biosecurity labs, such as the now famous institute in Wuhan, worked in partnership with the agribusiness sector to securitize industrial husbandry plants against outbreaks of new epidemics, such as the 2009 swine flu.
Figure 1. Construction site of a corporate grape farm, Hunan, China, 2018. Photograph by Ettore Santi.
Some of the design techniques that the party-state used to reshape China’s food regime and its spaces were the subject of my fieldwork in rural China between 2018 and 2019. While examining the principles and outcomes of these projects, I noticed that the debate on the pandemic’s genesis focused on single events, the leak versus the spillover, while failing to expose the toxic mentality that might have caused them. In my view, it was the system thinking that state experts adopted to scientifically reorganize the country’s rural environment to achieve stable and profitable food extraction that may have paved the way for unintended consequences like the pandemic. Treating the environment like a rationalizable business, the high-intensity production plants proliferating across rural China are altering the ecological networks of the country and, perhaps, of the entire planet.
The Chinese state adopted system thinking in the last decade, in conjunction with the party’s desire to invent a corporate model for the country’s food industry. Concerned with the scarcity of food and agricultural land provoked by the country’s post-1979 urbanization, state officials deemed family farming inadequate to meet the ambitious goals of national food self-sufficiency. Since the 2010s, as a response to an impending food crisis, the central government has run a constellation of pilot programs to transfer agricultural land from rural households to private- and state-owned agribusiness firms. The implementation of these campaigns required architects and state experts to physically redesign rural regions and individual villages to accommodate the technology and infrastructure needed to foster this corporate transition (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Rendering of Tongmu Village Leisure Farm exhibited at the local museum, Hunan, China, 2018.
Not surprisingly, in just a few years, China’s rural environment has become a testing ground for new techniques of environmental governance that involve the system sciences and their design thinking. At the same time, it has also become a terrain where unexpected and often hazardous ecological short-circuits are taking place.
Systematizing the Earth
The system sciences, which emerged in Europe and the United States in the mid-twentieth century, interpreted the universe as a unified complex of interconnected parts in dynamic equilibrium, rather than a sum of isolated bodies. This holistic view allowed scientists to design complex systems, such as the military apparatuses of the Cold War, by integrating theories from disciplines as diverse as ballistics, chemistry, and biology, into a single linear equation.
Previously, Western scientists, informed by the reductionist approaches of Newtonian physics, examined the functioning of the parts before that of the whole. Early biology, for example, first studied cells as modular and replicable units, and then examined their modes of aggregation into biological systems and, ultimately, into complex forms of life. The system sciences rejected this approach, focusing instead on the relationality that exists among all things in the universe.
In Post-Mao China, the system sciences received increasing attention from state institutions. The intellectual foundations of system thinking conveniently aligned with the state’s technocratic neo-Confucian governance. According to this view, the strict social order of celestial harmony (tiandi hexie, 天地和谐) could be achieved through the application of theories of system organization to the holistic management of the population and its environment.
As a result, in the last decade, system thinking has transformed the techniques of spatial planning and design in China. In 2018, the Ministry of Land and Resources launched a new planning program called Land and Space Planning (guo tu kongjian zongti guihua, 国土空间总体规划) to be implemented by all local governments. Regional planning before 2018 comprised a variety of documents and protocols, each specializing in managing individual aspects of land use such as rural-urban integration plans, real estate master plans, agricultural development plans, and environmental protection plans. Instead, the 2018 Land and Space Plan aimed at governing all aspects of regional planning holistically, and made them subject to a single overarching government approval.
Artificial intelligence is now in charge of this holistic land use governance. The Land and Space Algorithm considers a given jurisdiction, such as a rural township, as a bounded ecological system with limited resources and carrying capacity. After assigning a score to each land plot based on census data on topography, flood risk, environmental hazards, soil salinity, and biodiversity, the algorithm ranks each area's suitability for construction, agriculture, and ecological protection. It then delivers the most efficient land use layout based on theories of complex system organization.
“Early biology first studied cells as modular and replicable units, and then examined their modes of aggregation into biological systems and, ultimately, into complex forms of life. The system sciences rejected this approach, focusing instead on the relationality that exists among all things in the universe. ”
When this automatically generated layout diverges from the land uses already in place, planners prescribe settlement demolitions, resculpting of the terrain, and other invasive changes of the physical environment to match the ideal scheme of land classification crafted by the sovereign algorithm. The result is a machinic environment, carefully designed to make regional land attractive for the emerging corporate agribusiness and land management sectors.
Designing the Efficient Village
In 2018, the transformative power of system thinking hit Tongshan village, in northern Hunan province. A new village design scheme prescribed an optimal layout to gain stable income from village land. The algorithm had located an intensive rice farm on the flatlands and a tea-themed tourist park (Figure 3) on the hills, where the sloping topography did not allow agricultural machines to maneuver. Based on a binary spatial layout—the mechanized production and the tourist consumption areas—the design scheme sought to transform a village dwelling into a full-fledged industrial system that integrated diverse labor techniques.
Figure 3. Xiangfeng Tea-themed Tourist Park, similar to the site described in this essay. At the center, a village woman works as a tea picker. Xiangfeng, Hunan, China, 2018. Photograph by Ettore Santi.
High intensity production on the flatlands required the work of specialized farmers, especially men employed by agricultural firms, maneuvering special equipment across the rectangular fields. In contrast, the tourist park on the hills employed female workers as tea pickers on a contract. Women’s picking did not rely on machines, thus allowing them to perform a practice that seemed authentic to the eyes of urban tourists (figure 4).
Figure 4. Advertising panel of Xinagfeng Tea-themed Tourist Park showing village women picking tea teaves. Xiangfeng, Hunan, China, 2018. Photograph by Ettore Santi.
The business model that underpinned the village design presumed the association of masculinity with intensive and specialized production, and femininity with traditional, low-intensity work. By replacing the heterogeneous food system of family farming with this binary corporate scheme, the architects and the local government had imposed an alien ecology of labor on the village, calibrated via predetermined norms of human and non-human bodies, such as gender strength or plant reproductivity, so that it could provide calculable output and secure profit.
The implementation of this mathematically modeled ecology, however, unleashed several unintended outcomes. For example, following the land use algorithm, the architects had prescribed the demolition of some of the dwellings in the village, located at the center of the flatlands, which they considered an obstacle to mechanized cropping. On the shore of a pond up the hill, village leaders had financed the construction of a resettlement complex to house the displaced villagers (similar to the one in figure 5). The program also entailed filling up the pond with topsoil obtained from the farm construction downhill so as to make arable land available to the resettled farmers.
Figure 5. Farmer’s resettlement complex built in accordance to the township Land and Space Plan, Hunan, China, 2019. Photograph by Ettore Santi.
After the first farming season, however, the new fields reclaimed from the pond delivered only a tiny fraction of the expected rice yield, leading the farmers to realize that soil was too dry and polluted to serve as a rice paddy. As a response, the farmers planted orange trees, which they considered more adequate to a dry soil environment. Once again, however, the poor topsoil quality frustrated the farmers’ investment plan. Less than two years after their relocation uphill, the villagers were left with no choice but to lease the reclaimed land to the tea company in exchange for a small rent, while seeking temporary employment within the company itself or elsewhere.
“By replacing the heterogeneous food system of family farming with this binary corporate scheme, architects and the local government had imposed an alien ecology of labor on the village... so that it could provide calculable output and secure profit.”
Furthermore, the landfilled pond had long provided income for at least twelve families who lived on the village hill and utilized the basin for fish farming and irrigation. To mitigate their losses, the architects had budgeted for the construction of a replacement pool on land categorized as unfit for farming or construction (figure 6). The new pool, however, could only be reached through a 500 meters-long uphill sloping trail that made it impossible to use it for daily water consumption. In addition, the chemicals in the waterproof concrete used in the construction of the pool had altered the water acidity, thus creating a hostile environment for growing fish. Rather than buying expensive acidity correction products, many farmers turned to farming practices that did not require using the pond. As they started farming chickens, pigs, and beehives in their homes’ backyards, the reclaimed land and the new concrete pool lay unused on the hill.
Figure 6. Artificial pool (in the foreground) and artificial hill (in the background) built as part of a nature conservation zone established in the Land and Space Plan, Hunan, China, 2019. Photograph by Ettore Santi.
Rationality out-of-control
What state experts in Tongshan had conceived as a rational scheme for achieving land efficiency, a binary model of male-driven production and female-driven consumption business, had instead ignited a chain of unpredictable events that inevitably proliferated across the village space. While we can’t exactly assess the extent to which this design approach is responsible for the current pandemic, we can certainly imagine its hazardous role in the future, especially considering its combined effects on the hundreds of thousands of villages and townships currently undergoing food system restructuring.
What kind of design, then, can help us address our ecological uncertainties? The main problem with system thinking is that it has deluded experts that they could govern everything that constitutes an ecological ensemble. It has done so by conceiving of humans as infallible rational beings, and nature as a passive resource that can be understood through the universal language of mathematics, inscribed into diagrammatic design schemes of efficient production, and ultimately sold to the private sector for profit. Hidden behind a narrative of environmental consciousness, system thinking has, instead, reproduced an anthropocentric view that interprets everything beyond human as an inert resource to be colonized and exploited at will. Abandoning this toxic mentality of modernity is key for shaping design approaches that work for the survival of the planet, and of our own species with it.
Acknowledgements
This essay was made possible by support from the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies’ Predissertation Grant in China Studies, with funds provided by the Luce Foundation, and the Graham Foundation’s Carter Manny Research Citation. At UC Berkeley, the Center for Chinese Studies’ Pamela and Kenneth Fong Fellowship, the Institute of International Studies’ John L. Simpson Memorial Fellowship, and the Global Metropolitan Studies’ Research Fellowship generously supported this research.
