‘Chinese’ or ‘Local’?

Abstract

The article discusses the appearance of complex relations around the production and supply chains of agricultural products of ‘Chinese’ greenhouses in the Siberian suburbs. The authors attempt to analyse the contradictory relations as an assemblage in Manuel DeLanda’s theoretical optics. Attempt to explain how the market manipulation of vegetable identification (‘Chinese’/‘local’) conceals a complex social assemblage with a multiplicity of identities, which, through the practices of translation, allows the assemblage to be combined. The study demonstrates how ‘Chinese’ actors engage material resources, through assemblages with local residents and the authorities, which allows them to acquire a symbolic resource of ‘locality’ and get involved in the situation of ‘local capitalism’. For local residents, this is an opportunity to integrate into capitalist relations through the sale of the symbolic resource ‘locality’. Such a sale of ‘locality’ is only possible if there are stable perceptions of ‘Chineseness’, in the maintenance of which the local population are engaged.