One village, one product: Agro‐industrial village corporatism in contemporary China

Abstract

This paper investigates the implementation of “one village, one product” (OVOP) in four peri‐urban villages in China's Yangtze River Delta. China's agricultural transformation, including the introduction of new corporate actors and the growing pressure of market discipline, has challenged the relevance of villages in the organization of agricultural production. In response, village cadres in thousands of Chinese villages have used OVOP to transform their villages into agro‐industrial firms and re‐exert their control over the agricultural surplus, echoing earlier examples of village corporatism. Rooted in agricultural specialization, OVOP encompasses a diversity of strategies for the production of locality‐based value. I disaggregate these strategies into four sociospatial dimensions that comprise locality—place, network, territory, and scale. Place‐based branding is the dominant strategy, but village cadres also pursue complementary sociospatial strategies to ensure their control over the realization of the brand's value and reconstitute their redistributive and administrative powers.

E-commerce: A platform for local economic development? Evidence from Taobao Villages in Zhejiang Province, China

“…It has since been widely promoted by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), evolving into a national government-sanctioned policy for poverty alleviation (Natsuda et al, 2012). With over 50,000 villages in China reported to have participated in its use (Smith, 2019), the OVOP model rivals the TV model we concentrate on here.…”

“…The model has proved influential in policy circles in China and across Southeast Asia but also in Africa and Latin America (Mukai and Fujikura, 2015). The evidence from China suggests that it is a model that can be accompanied by a strong measure of local institutionalization with formation of collective village enterprises or associations and associated branding (Smith, 2019).…”

The Potential of Understory Production Systems to Improve Laying Hen Welfare

“…In China, the cage farming system and intensive farming are the mainstream systems used in the livestock and poultry industries ( Figure 1 a). The ‘free-range’ model—or welfare farming—is small in size and seems only subordinate to strengthening the supply of green agricultural products [ 70 ]. In 2020, China’s green food production of eggs and poultry meat was only 214,000 tons, accounting for less than one per cent of the total production, with opportunity for expansion [ 71 ].…”

The Resilience of Diversified Clusters: Reconfiguring Commodity Networks in Rural China during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The model of industrial clustering has also been adopted to boost rural and agricultural economic growth [16][17][18][19]. For instance, inspired by the One-Village-One-Product (OVOP) initiative from Japan, other Asian countries, such as Vietnam [20], Thailand [21], and China [22], have tried to promote this model in their rural economies. The success rate of this model, however, has been low.…”

“…In the process of rural industrialization, some local governments in China actively promoted the growth of a particular industry and fostered the formation of industrial clusters [48]. In more recent years, local governments have also tried to develop "specialized villages" where the majority of households specialize in the production of a particular agricultural or industrial product [22,49]. Despite these efforts, these agro-based specialized villages or rural industrial clusters remain the exception rather than the norm.…”