When Fruit Trees Uproot the Grain: Cracks & Agrarian Change in Rural China

China feeds nearly one-fifth of the world's population with limited arable land, yet its farmland is increasingly subject to non-grain cultivation and abandonment. This paper examines an institutional crack through which this process unfolds: state-led farmland consolidation — intended to modernise agriculture — that destroyed the conditions for rice cultivation, leaving fields abandoned for years. From these ruins, pear orchards emerged unplanned, gradually revaluing agricultural landscapes from food production toward consumption, service, and spectacle. The paper asks how unplanned agrarian landscapes emerge from the failures of state environmental intervention, and how competing actors contest and reshape them through everyday practice.

Drawing on six months of fieldwork in a Chinese village and engaging with political ecology and assemblage thinking, I trace how damaged soils, pear trees, policy contradictions, seasonal rhythms, and infrastructure together reconstitute rural place in ways neither planned nor controlled by the state. I also explore how villagers navigate this transition through everyday practices — selective participation, strategic manoeuvring within legal grey zones, and the quiet persistence of alternative livelihoods — that hold competing visions of place in tension. The paper argues that attending to both the more-than-human entanglements and the everyday politics through which unplanned landscapes emerge reveals how informal transformations of farmland reshape the meanings and identities of rural place.

Haoxu Chen is a third-year PhD researcher in Human Geography at Durham University (CSC-funded), Her research sits at the intersection of political ecology, assemblage thinking, and agrarian studies, exploring how agricultural landscape transformations in rural China are shaped by the entanglements of state power, local agency, and non-human actors. She is supervised by Prof. Mike Crang and Dr. Yimin Zhao.

MCI’s PGR workshops are lunchtime seminars held in person at the Manchester China Institute. They seek to bring together students, faculty and staff who can best provide feedback as postgraduate researchers develop their ideas. Free lunch will be provided.

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