Networking Shangnan's tea: socio-economic relations, commodities and agrarian change in rural China

China's central government has long signalled its desire for scaled-up agriculture. This study scrutinises the place-specific dynamics of this government-led restructuring by examining the networks of socioeconomic relations that produce tea as a commodity in Shangnan County, Shaanxi. We identify a core production-circulation network comprised of relations between agribusinesses, cooperatives and smallholders. This network is historically contingent, deeply embedded in the logics of scaling-up and poverty reduction, and is composed not just of people and institutions, but of flows of policies, capital, and value. While larger operators have accumulated great capital and political resources, outcomes for small farmers remain ambiguous.