Blip

About this episode

A presentation by Nicholas Menzies, Wildland Resource Science, UCLA.Part of the University of Chicago Program on the Global Environment's inaugural conference on the Social Life of Forests, held May 30-31, 2008. Over the last fifty years or so, the landscape of Xishuangbanna prefecture in the southwestern borders of China’s Yunnan province has been transformed from a mosaic of tropical forest, paddy rice and swidden cultivation, to extensive tracts of cash crop plantations, mostly rubber and tea. In the history of that transformation, the state has played a major role in advancing a vision of modernity in which large scale plantations of cash crops effect the transformation of society from a peasant mode of production to a modern, industrialized and ultimately socialist model. In implementing this strategy, a clear distinction was made until the mid 1980s between immigrant Han Chinese workers on State Farms and indigenous ethnic minorities who were deemed too backward to be capable of managing rubber. In the uplands, policies to end swidden agriculture, together with government poverty alleviation programs promised prosperity through the cultivation of terraced tea, a modern and ‘scientific’ alternative to the long-established practice of growing tea under the forest canopy. Over the last decade, however, the growth of urban and international markets for “green” products and for products with an ethnic and cultural heritage, have confounded government agencies’ conventional constructions of modernity and scientific development. The formerly ignored, backward practice of growing tea under the forest canopy has been recast as a sustainable, marketable niche product with a distinguished cultural cachet triggering official and unofficial plans to recreate “ancient forests” under which to grow more ancient forest tea.

• Category

  Learning

• Release Date

  May 30, 2008

• Runtime

  30:45