Dairy and diaspora: postponed reform on the guangming overseas Chinese farm of Shenzhen

Abstract

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 essay explains how the delay in reform 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.