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This paper examines everyday interactions, and particularly the role of traditional ritual and relationships, in the mobilization of rural social movements in Taiwan. In Chinese society, ‘guanxi’ (interpersonal relationships) are involved in everyday social interactions. Studies of collective action, such as social movements, cannot ignore the role that ‘guanxi’ play. This paper argues that collective action in Taiwan is strongly influenced by social practices, such as ‘guanxi’. The early part of the paper discusses social movement theories of social network, and briefly reviews ‘guanxi’ theory and its relationship with the concept of ‘social capital’. The later part examines the function of ‘guanxi’ in two recent social movements: the anti–No. 6/8 Naphtha Cracking Project (A6/8NCP) movement at Taixi and the anti–leather factory movement at Gouzao. These two social movements provide excellent case studies for rethinking how collective action functions in Taiwan.

Over the past two decades export-oriented agro-food production and contract farming have been regarded as new panaceas for rural development in Taiwan. With East Asian consumers hungry for fresh lettuce, since the early 2000s some Taiwanese farmers have ventured into lettuce production. The commodity/value chain literature has been widely employed by agrarian scholars to understand the reconfiguration of the global agri-food economy. However, these approaches tend to treat the markets as unquestioned artefacts. Taking inspiration from a performative approach and assemblage thinking, this article attempts to unveil the processes from which markets emerge. Following Deleuze and Guattari's propositions, I argue that agri-food export markets are ongoing processes through which heterogeneous actants are held stable or disintegrate. With reference to ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Maixing community, I show that the lettuce export market is a heterogeneous assemblage in which all enlisted actants can act to territorialise/de-territorialise the market assemblage. This article furthers our understanding of the geographies of market-making and opens up the black box of markets.

In 2011, thousands of Taiwanese farmers gathered in Yunlin County to protest against a government environmental management programme which attempted to address the land subsidence that has threatened Taiwan’s High-Speed Rail infrastructure. New environmental monitoring technologies have been developed to deal with the land subsidence but these have, simultaneously, provoked contestation. The dispute indicates that the horizontalism inherent in traditional studies of geopolitics fails to account for the politics of verticality. Indeed, recent work on volumetric politics opens up new horizons for thinking about the exercise of power through three dimensions; the geopolitics of the underground have remained untheorised. Moreover, the existing literature on volume also fails to account for the chaotic state of the material world. From the perspective of assemblage thinking, I outline three characteristics which shape the ‘geopolitics of land subsidence’. From this standpoint, this paper argues for a geographical approach to subterranean politics which puts more emphasis on volume, emergence and matter. With reference to ethnographical fieldwork conducted in scientific laboratories and in Yunlin County, I demonstrate how subterranean materials continuously frustrate the state’s volumetric practices. By problematising the geopolitics of land subsidence, this paper also advances the understanding of political geology, which is seeking to ‘decolonise’ and ‘pluralise geological thought’.

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