State-Directed Capitalist Agrarian Change in the Creation of China’s Biggest Tea County: Integrating Capital and Labor in Meitan County, Guizhou

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the reconstruction of a county tea industry in order to help map capitalist agrarian change in contemporary China. The concentration of the tea industry in Meitan County, Guizhou, that began in the 1930s was further centralized under a state-owned farm and factory after 1949. Following the 1990s decline of the state-owned industry, the tea industry reemerged in a new form under a process of state-directed capitalist agrarian change in the early 2000s. Contemporary Meitan’s almost 500 independent tea processors market their products to the changing tastes of Chinese consumers. With an increased attention to tea “quality,” capitalist processors have had to take greater control over the labor process of farmers. Thus the industry has taken on a complex structure through a process of vertically integrating tea growers and processors, making use of a county tea producers association, dragonhead enterprises, specialized cooperatives, contract farming, and new property forms.