Migrants, Milk and Medicine: Market Reform on an Overseas Chinese Farm in Shenzhen

Abstract:

In 1973, four cows and one bull were shipped to Guangming Farm, an agricultural production base for China to supply fresh produce to British Hong Kong. The cattle’s human caretakers included Malayan, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Chinese expelled from Southeast Asia due to local ethnonationalist policies.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Guangming was a state-directed productive space with prominent features of the planned economy, ironically installed when the rest of Shenzhen and China was embarking on market reform. The reform of Guangming Farm lagged the marketization in Shenzhen and did not begin in earnest until the early 2000s. This delay ultimately served the state’s interests.

The People’s Republic of China mobilized Southeast Asian refugee labor to grow international trade and expand state capital. In this process, the diasporic Chinese became, simultaneously, the agents and targets of Deng Xiaoping’s reform.

About the speaker:

Taomo Zhou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies and Dean’s Chair in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. Her first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), won a Foreign Affairs “Best Books of 2020” award and an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.

Taomo is currently working on her second book tentatively entitled “Made in Shenzhen: A Global History of China’s First Special Economic Zone,” which is under advance contract with Stanford University Press. She is also researching motherhood during the Cold War.